Hijuelos oscar biography sample

Oscar Hijuelos is the only Latino to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, which he won in 1990 for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, a bittersweet exploration of the lives of two Cuban-born musicians and their families in the 1950s.

His work is characterized by a beautiful literary style through which he captures and explores individual character.

Hijuelos was born in New York City and spent a very small part of his early years in Cuba. He graduated from the City College of New York, and has acknowledged an early debt to Henry Roth and his ultimate novel of Jewish adaptation, Call It Sleep. At the age of three, during a trip to the island, Hijuelos fell ill and subsequently lived for a period of time in a Connecticut children's sanitorium, which he chronicled in his first novel, the Bildungsroman Our House in the Last World.

Our House sets out many of the themes with which Hijuelos has grappled during his career: a search for spiritu