[2] During this period of solitude, he would experiment with a chemistry lab, developing a profitable starch compound, became a more improved poet and received political literature from Europe that would influence him.

[5] The Literary Circle saw themselves as freethinkers and that they were destined to change Peru, reaching out to González Prada, who immediately reoriented the groups direction.

[2][5] During his first address to the group at the Ateneo, he would criticize those who looked to the past, stating "Our liberty will be useless if we limit ourselves in torm to the exaggerated purism of Madrid, or if in substance we submit ourselves to the Syllabus of Rome.

"[5] In 1886, he became the head of the Literary Circle, stating:[2] I see myself, from this day on, at the head of a group destined to become the radical party of our literature.During Fiestas Patrias on 28 July 1888, González Prada's Speech at the Politeama, read by an Ecuadorian orator due to the writer's stage fright, received thunderous applause by the audience, with President of Peru Andrés Avelino Cáceres, who was in attendance, saying "l did not know whether to arrest him or embrace him".

[2] His most famous book, Free Pages, caused a public outcry that brought González Prada dangerously close to excommunication from the Catholic Church.

[6] Until his death, González Prada dedicated himself to educating university students and workers, holding Luz y Amor (Light and Love) discussion groups and sharing his writings with them.

An atheist, a follower of Darwin, Spencer, and Comte, Manuel González Prada was a powerful polemicist whose targets were the Catholic Church, the Spanish tradition, and, generally, any form of conservatism.

He would describe anarchism as "a new Christianity ... without Christ" and that it would provide "unlimited freedom and the greatest well-being for the individual with the abolition of the state and private property".

[2] After seeing the failures of nationalism, his strong moral values and after embracing anarchism, Gonzalez Prada concluded:[2] "Given the general inclination of man to abuse power, all government is evil and all authority means tyranny.

[1] Linguistics scholar Bohdan Plaskacz would describe González Prada "as one of the greatest essayists of Latin America, champion of the rights of Peruvian Indians and spiritual father of the socialist movement of the following generation".

[9] Peruvian intellectuals influenced by González Prada include José Carlos Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre.

[1] Thomas Ward, director of the Latin American and Latino Studies at Loyola University Maryland, would say of González Prada:[10] "[E]ach century can boast of a voice that sounds in the desert shouting against colonialism, the corrupt, and its accomplices.

... A voice that, from the ruins of the War of the Pacific, ... rose up against pusillanimity, against the lack of principles, the Creole concept of Peru excluding the Andean, was that of Manuel González Prada.

"Besides being a philosopher and a significant political agitator, González Prada is important as the first Latin American author to write in a style known as modernismo (modernista in Spanish, different from Anglo-American modernism) poet in Peru, anticipating some of the literary innovations that Rubén Darío would shortly bring to the entire Hispanic world.