Oscar Hijuelos

Oscar Jerome Hijuelos (August 24, 1951 – October 12, 2013) was an American novelist of Cuban descent. During a year-long convalescence from a childhood illness spent in a Connecticut hospital, he lost his knowledge of Spanish, his parents' native language. He was educated in New York City, and wrote short stories and advertising copy.

For his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (later adapted for the movie The Mambo Kings), he became the first Hispanic to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Early life Hijuelos was born in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, to Cuban immigrant parents, Pascual and Magdalena (Torrens) Hijuelos, both from Holguín, Cuba. His father worked as a hotel cook. and public schools, and later Bronx Community College, Lehman College and Manhattan Community College. He studied writing at the City College of New York (B.A., 1975; M.A. in Creative Writing, 1976) He practiced various professions, including working for an advertising agency, Transportation Displays Inc., before taking up writing full-time. His first novel, Our House in the Last World, was published in 1983, and won the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the novel for The New York Times, describes it as "essentially elegiac in tone — a Chekhovian lament for a life of missed connections and misplaced dreams." His autobiography, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, was published in 2011.

Oscar Hijuelos' Papers are located at Columbia University Libraries.

Teaching Hijuelos taught at Hofstra University and was affiliated with Duke University, where he was a member of the faculty of the Department of English for 6 years before his death.

Awards In addition to the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Hijuelos received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1983, the year he published his first novel, Our House in the Last World. In 1985 the novel received the Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Rome. In 2000, he received the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature. In 2003 he received the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature.

Personal life Hijuelos' first marriage ended in divorce. He married writer and editor Lori Marie Carlson on December 12, 1998, in Manhattan.

Death On October 12, 2013, Oscar Hijuelos collapsed of a heart attack while playing tennis in Manhattan and never regained consciousness. He was 62 years old. He is survived by his second wife.

Legacy The tennis courts that Hijuelos died on in Riverside Park, New York were renamed after him.

Works

Major 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) Mr. Ives' Christmas (1995) Empress of the Splendid Season (1999) A Simple Habana Melody (from when the world was good) (2002) Dark Dude (2008) Beautiful Maria of My Soul (2010) Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir (2011) Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise (2015) (manuscript edited and published posthumously)

Contributions Preface, Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction, edited by Delia Poey and Virgil Suarez. New York, HarperPerennial, 1992. Introduction, Cool Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Growing up Latino in the United States, edited by Lori M. Carlson. New York, Holt, 1994. Introduction, The Cuban American Family Album by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler. New York, Oxford University Press, 1996. Contributor, Best of Pushcart Press III. Pushcart, 1978. Contributor, You're On!: Seven Plans in English and Spanish, edited by Lori M. Carlson. New York, Morrow Junior Books, 1999.