This essay looks into the different forms in which José Donoso’s work inaugurates in Chile the figure of the contemporary professional writer, as a key point of inflection within the process of professionalization of the literary field since the beginning of the XXth century, still in force to the present day. Through consistent representation of himself as a writer, his work and the circuits it activates, in his journals and his book Historia personal del boom; we argue that Donoso anchors the professional conception of literature in what he sees as an “international language”, that not only addresses a transformation of the novel as an aesthetic object, but also incorporates a transformation of the literary circuits as well, now imagined as necessarily transnational and in anticipation of the book industry’s operations.