If the recreation of childhood, colored by idealization and nostalgia, comes into its own in the second half of the nineteenth century, it does not always appear in Spanish America in what one might call a pure state. Notwithstanding prestigious and well-received examples such as Renan's Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, Anatole France's Le Livre de mon ami and the greatly successful David Copperfield, to which should be added, this side of the Atlantic, Ismaelillo, the enormously influential book of poems calling attention to childhood that Martí wrote to his three-year-old son, many Spanish American autobiographers of the twentieth century continued to make quick work of their early years, intent as they were on aggrandizing the adult. In Peru, for example, José Santos Chocano, in his autobiography subtitled “The Thousand and One Adventures,” strategically suppresses childhood from his story. The chapter bearing the somewhat grandiose title “El hombre que no fue niño” – the man who was never a child – begins, without a jot of self-irony, in the following fashion: “The man who was never a child. This might seem like a frivolous phrase striving for literary effect when it is merely the stark expression of a fearful reality. My childhood was the War of the Pacific.”