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These eight autograph manuscripts, written between 1870 and 1910 by the Peruvian writer, lexicographer and representative of literary “costumbrismo”, Manuel Ricardo Palma Soriano (1833-1919), evidence his relevant participation in political, social and cultural events of the Peruvian republican history. 

Considered the founder of the literary genre of traditions, Palma was a language scholar, musical poet, irreverent prose writer, gourmet anthologist, and director of the National Library of Peru for almost thirty years, between 1883 and 1912. The literary genre that characterizes him was disseminated, having followers in Latin America, such as the Chilean Manuel Concha, the Mexican Artemio del Valle Arispe, the Guatemalans Manuel Diéguez, Fermín Aycinena, and Agustín Mancós, the Argentines Justo Pastor Obligado and Bernardo Frías, the Uruguayan Isidoro Demaría, the Bolivian Julio Lucas Jaimes, the Colombian Luis Capella Toledo, among others. According to Chilean scholar Toribio Medina, Palma was the founder of this "literary genre".

In his book “Neologisms and Americanisms” of 1896, Palma assumed an “Americanist” continental position, defending the role of speech as the engine of linguistic change, thus vindicating the use of speakers from this part of the world, in opposition to the orthodoxy that the Royal Spanish Academy intended to impose.

Five of the manuscripts are preliminary and near-final versions of works intended for printing, fragments that survived the fire in the National Library of Peru in 1943, and are part of the 4,100 documents, manuscripts and prints that have been identified within the Bibliographic-Documentary Heritage Recovery Project after the tragedy that affected more than 100,000 prints and 40,000 manuscripts.