Don Juan is Byron's dazzling mock-epic of seduction, exile, war, and social masquerade, following a naïve young Spaniard through Seville, shipwreck, Greece, Constantinople, Russia, and England. Written in supple ottava rima, it converts high romance into urbane comedy, mingling lyric tenderness, bawdy wit, political satire, and conversational digression. In the Romantic age, it stands both within and against epic tradition, dismantling heroic pretension with astonishing formal ease. George Gordon Byron, sixth Baron Byron, brought to the poem the materials of a life already mythologized: aristocratic scandal, European travel, political restlessness, and self-exile after his separation from Lady Byron. His experiences in the Mediterranean, his sympathy for liberal causes, and his distrust of moral respectability sharpened the poem's cosmopolitan irreverence. Don Juan became his grand late project, unfinished at his death in Greece in 1824. This is essential reading for anyone interested in satire, Romanticism, or the modern comic novel before the novel fully claimed its form. Readers willing to follow Byron's glittering detours will find not merely a libertine tale, but a searching anatomy of power, desire, hypocrisy, and storytelling itself.