“Hijuelos’s pure storytelling skills commission every incident with a life and breath of its own.” —Publishers Weekly
The first Latino author to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Oscar Hijuelos is famous for experimenting with form and voice, exploring memory, assimilation, and identity in the rich language that has become his trademark. The novel of immigrant life is a durable and extremely significant tradition in American literature, and Hijuelos has emerged as one of its top recent practitioners across audiences and generations.
Growing up in New York City as the son of Cuban immigrants influenced his first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), which explores the worlds of memory and displacement through a Cuban family transplanted to New York in the 1940s. Hijuelos evolved into a writer known for his rich, detailed descriptions of Cuban-American life and honed his craft over a period seven years during which he worked in advertising and wrote fiction by night. Working in the short story genre at first, he landed a group of stories in the 1978 anthology Best of Pushcart Press III which led to a series of grants that gave him more and more free time to write; one of them, in 1980, was a scholarship to the prestigious Breadloaf Writers Conference.
While Hijuelos received much critical praise for his early work, it was his second novel that catapulted him onto best-seller lists and earned him international acclaim. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is a bittersweet exploration of the lives of two Cuban-born musicians and their families. Set in the 1950s, the story follows the brothers’ journey from Havana to New York where they start an orchestra. Described as lyrical and exhilarating by critics, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was later adapted for the silver screen in a film starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas.
With The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, he took his exploration of memory in a different direction, telling the story from the perspectives of several female narrators, and stretching them across several generations. With Empress of the Splendid Season, he switched perspectives again for the story of a cleaning woman whose life is a stark counterpoint to that of her wealthy employer’s, and in A Simple Habana Melody, Hijuelos returned to “when the world was good,” in 1920s Havana with a love story told by a Cuban composer whose infatuation inspires him to write the most famous song of his career.
His work is characterized by a beautiful literary style through which he captures and explores individual character. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he is a recipient of the Rome Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. His five previous novels have been translated into twenty-five languages.
His first novel for young adults, Dark Dude (2009) follows Rico, a Cuban American teen, as he searches for a sense of self and ultimately realizes that “where you are doesn’t change who you are.” Rico’s story commands teens’ attention with its celebration of friendship and fundamental questions about life purpose, family responsibility, and the profound ways that experience shapes identity.
Hijuelos attended public schools in New York before entering City College. Hijuelos received his bachelor of arts degree in 1975 and a masters degree in English and writing in 1976 from City College.
At the podium, Hijuelos explores the rich history of the American Latino experience, sharing personal anecdotes that have inspired his body of work. Discussing his inspirations and influences that encouraged him to become a writer, Hijuelos surveys the state of modern literature and inspires emerging writers to seek creative expression through personal reflection. Drawing upon his cultural heritage, Hijuelos’ themes are ever-present: assimilation and identity, love and loss, and the power — and pain — of family life, but his approach is purely his own: authentic, musical and very, very funny.
