Abstract
Ricardo Güiraldes has often been interpreted as one of the most important representatives of Latin American regionalist (or telluric) literature. Nevertheless, his famous novel entitled Don Segundo Sombra (1926) can and should be read as an excellent example of modernist fiction, expressing its author’s desire to depict a young man’s initiation, but at the same time to analyze his evolution in the permanent effort to become not only a better expression of himself, but also a person capable to write down his own story. The mere act of living in the vast Argentinean pampa is thus symbolically doubled by the protagonist’s lucid meditation on the implications of the activity of writing, the initially modest gaucho becoming a respected author expressing the novelist’s own experience and complex process of initiation.