A romantic novel with traces of modernism:The Colombian writer Jose Maria Vargas Vila (1860-1933) was one of the most popular and widely read novelists in Latin America, as he added to his celebrity as a polemicist and friend of freedom, that of the romantic writer, with erotic allusions and an original literary style. His first novel "Aura o las violetas" tells of a love story between two teen-agers and in its development one can see signs of what would be later called modernism. Originally published in 1887, this work is perhaps the most well known novel of the artist.