A century before Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez published his landmark novel Cien años de soledad (1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude), the first history of Colombian literature, written by José María Vergara y Vergara, appeared in print under the title Historia de la literatura en Nueva Granada (1867, History of literature in New Granada). This first history of the literature of “New Granada,” a keystone in the nation-building process in Colombia, was mostly about the Colonial literary tradition in the region called New Granada at the time, and not truly about the literature of the new nation per se. In a newly founded nation without a clear sense of exactly what its national culture might be considered to be, Vergara y Vergara's book was as much a proposal for a national literary tradition as it was a literary history.

By the end of the century, during a period identified in Colombia as the Regeneration (“La Regeneración,” 1886–1909), an insistence on the key place of national literature and national culture led Colombians to refer to their capital, Bogotá, as the “Athens of South America.” The efforts to consolidate the literature of this region into a national “Colombian” literature was highlighted by Daniel Samper Ortega's massive project to anthologize and historicize all Colombian writing in his Selección Samper Ortega de Literatura Colombiana (1935–7). These multiple volumes of Colombian literature, consisting mostly of poetry and essays and which included many political speeches, were mostly a collection of writings from the Colonial period. Thus, the actual literature representing the new nation was minimal. The efforts in Colombia to construct a national literature were accompanied in Latin America in general by attempts to write the first histories of Latin American literature, as has been outlined by Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. They point out that the first history of Latin American literature was published in 1893 in the form of an anthology by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo.

During the period of Ortega's anthology of national Colombian literature – the first three decades of the twentieth century – several histories of Colombian literature did appear in print. Thus, José Joaquín Ortega Torres published his Historia de la literatura colombiana in 1935, and later Antonio Gómez Restrepo came forth with his own authoritative Historia de la literatura colombiana in 1945.