In view of the key role played by prose writings in the development of modernismo, it is not surprising that the modernistas also contributed greatly to the genre of the novel in Spanish America. The modernista legacy to the Spanish American novel is significant and extensive, despite the fact that the modernistas did not predominate in this genre as they did in poetry, or in their crónicas and short stories. As Max Henríquez Ureña points out, in Spanish America “after the 1880s, novelistic production increases in quantity and importance.” Supported by a tradition dating back to the Independence period (in works such as José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's El Periquillo Sarniento [The Mangy Parrot, 1816]) the novelistic genre flourished owing to many of the same socioeconomic conditions that contributed to the rise of modernismo – political stability, the growth of the cities, the rise of mass journalism. The modernista novels were, quite simply, important components of a broad novelistic “boom” that occurred in Spanish America around the turn of the nineteenth century, which also encompassed novels written in other modalities, such as criollismo (Creolism) or the French-derived modes of Naturalism and Decadence. A cursory survey of literary histories by Fernando Alegría (1918–2005), Enrique Anderson Imbert (1910–2000), Cedomil Goic (b. 1928), Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906–2001), Luis Alberto Sánchez (1900–94), and Max Henríquez Ureña (1885–1968) produces a list of some forty modernista novels, from Martí's Lucía Jerez (originally titled Amistad funesta [Fatal Friendship], 1885) to Carlos Reyles's El embrujo de Sevilla (Castanets, 1927). Recent scholarship has also uncovered the earliest modernista novel, Por donde se sube al cielo (Where One Rises to Heaven, 1882), written by Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera.

The modernista novels arose and developed during a period of approximately forty years, between the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. However, these novels are not evenly distributed throughout those four decades: only nine important modernista novels were published during the first seventeen years of the period, from 1882 to 1899, while in the following fourteen years, from 1900 to 1915, there are twenty.