- Born: August 24, 1951
- Birthplace: New York, NY
Oscar Hijuelos was the first Hispanic American author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his second novel, Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). His first novel, Our House in the Last World, had already won several awards including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rome Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Ingram-Merrill fellowship.
Hijuelos received both his bachelor's and master's degrees from the City University of New York and worked in an advertising agency at the same time as he began writing short stories. Some of the stories were eventually published in the Best of Pushcart Press III anthology in 1978. One of his first professional works, "Columbus Discovering America," received an outstanding writer citation from Pushcart Pressthat same year.
Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which was also nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1989, as well as the National Book Award from the National Book Foundation, was made into a movie starring Antonio Banderas and Armand Assante. In early September 2000, Hijuelos was honored at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. as part of the National Hispanic Heritage Awards.
Most Famous Works
- Our House in the Last World (1983)
- The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)
- The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993)
- Empress of the Splendid Season (1999)
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