Enrique Gomez Carillo at the age of seventeen published in the Guatemalan newspaper El Imparcial in February 1890 a two-part article entitled 'El ultimo folleto de Clarin'. It is a review of the sixth of Leopoldo Alas's Folletos literarios, Rafael Calvo y el teatro espanol, in which the freshly minted critic defends Clarin in the most laudatory terms against the attacks of the Salvadoren writer Francisco Gavidia, a close friend of Ruben Dario, both of whom Clarin's apparently anti-American stance had offended deeply. With this forgotten article Gomez Carillo unleashed a lively polemic, both for his impassioned praise of Clarin as a critic and as a fiction writer and for his acerbic, burlesque tone. In this respect, he echoed Clarin himself, who by this time had become one of the most widely read and hotly debated peninsular writers in Spanish America. Critics have documented the literary relations debated peninsular writers in Spanish America. Critics have documented the literary relations between Clarin and Gomez Carrillo after the latter's arrival in Madrid and after Clarin reviewed Gomez Carrillo's first book in 1892, but this obscure article, which is reprinted here, pushes the contact back two years and is a demonstration of the sincere and disinterested admiration that Gomez Carrillo felt for Clarin at a time when he owed him no debts.
