SOURCE: Mapes, E. K. “The First Published Writings of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera.” Hispanic Review 5, no. 3 (1937): 225-40.

In the following essay, Mapes asserts that scholarship on Nájera has been long-neglected and examines the conflicting evidence regarding Nájera's earliest publications.

One of the chief handicaps under which technical investigation on the Spanish American Modernist poets has always labored is the lack of genuinely accurate data on biography and chronology. It is for this reason that Raúl Silva Castro's recent book on Rubén Darío¹ occupies so important a place in Modernist criticism: it painstakingly verifies every available item of information regarding Darío's formative period in Chile. It is hoped that the present article will serve a similar purpose with regard to the earliest period in the literary career of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera. It is to be noted that both Sr. Silva...