Oscar Hijuelos (August 24, 1951 - October 12, 2013) was an American novelist born and raised in New York City.
His works often featured themes pertaining to the American immigrant experience. He was of Cuban descent.
As a young child, he contracted nephritis during a family vacation to Cuba and ended up spending a full year convalescing in a hospital in Connecticut.
He became fluent in English and during his long separation from his Spanish-speaking family, Hijuelos temporarily lost his knowledge of his parent’s native language. As an adult he wrote about how frightening it was for him as a young child to feel estranged from his roots.
Hijuelos attended public schools, Bronx Community College, Lehman College, and Manhattan Community College. He studied writing at the City College of New York earning a B.A. and an M.A. in creative writing. At City College, he studied under Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, Frederick Tuten, and Donald Barthelme. Barthelme became a mentor and lifelong friend.
After graduation, Hijuelos tried his hand at advertising and several related professions before becoming a full-time writer. He started out writing short stories and dramas. His first novel written in 1983, Our House in the Last World, is the story of a Cuban family living in the United States during the 1940s. it won the Rome prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He became the first Hispanic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel was adapted in 1992 for the movie The Mambo Kings which starred Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas. In 2005, it was adapted into a musical.
Hijuelos published his memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, in 2011. He credited Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and José Lezama Lima (writers from Cuba and Latin America) with greatly influencing his writing style. Though he often wrote about navigating between his Hispanic culture and his identity as a first generation American, he never wanted to be pigeon-holed as an ethnic writer. His works rarely touched on political themes or were outwardly political in nature.
Hijuelos taught at Hofstra University in New York. For the last six years of his life, he was affiliated with Duke University where he was a faculty member of the Department of English. During his writing career, Hijuelos also received The Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature and the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. Hijuelos died of a heart attack during a tennis match. In his honor, the Riverside Park tennis courts where he had his fatal heart attack were renamed after him.
Major Works by Oscar Hijuelos:
Our House in the Last World (1983)
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993)
Mr. Ives’ Christmas (1995)
Empress of the Splendid Season (1999)
A Simple Havana Melody (2002)
Dark Dude (2008)
Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010)
Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir (2011)
Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise (2015) - Hijuelos’ manuscript was edited and published posthumously.