The years covered by The Dinner at Gonfarone's were marked by the eruption in New York of all the signs of modernity. Telephones and motor cars became ubiquitous; skyscrapers rose higher and higher; campaigns for women's suffrage and for birth control gained traction, as did those for racial equality and workers’ rights. After a slow start, the twentieth century was gathering pace, but while the 1920s were quickly seen as ‘roaring’, an epithet that has stuck, the previous decade has never been susceptible to easy definition; indeed, its first few years are sometimes regarded as the dregs of the nineteenth century. From a literary perspective, these years are conventionally cast as the calm before the storm of modernism associated with the annus mirabilis of 1922. In the chronological A New Literary History of America, almost all years have entries, but the second half of the second decade of the twentieth century includes only three: 1915 features for Robert Frost's return to the USA from England and the release of D. W. Griffiths's The Birth of a Nation, and 1917 for Albert C. Barnes's request to John Dewey to attend his seminar at Columbia. The Dinner at Gonfarone's suggests that rather more of significance was going on at this time. By the end of 1914, there was already a substantial Hispanic population in New York, though the large influx which would help determine the later character of the city had yet to take place. Broadly speaking—and with the focus on writers—there had been two previous generations of Hispanic presence in New York, both dominated by Cubans, almost all of them agitating against Spanish control of their island. Some were well-to-do plantation owners who lived transnational lives, others were political exiles. Felix Varela was perhaps the key figure in the first generation, Jose Marti definitely the central figure in the second; but as early as 1806 Francisco de Miranda's grand scheme to liberate Spanish America had been formed in New York: he was intercepted en route, but it wouldn't be the last such effort.