Oscar Hijuelos

Oscar Hijuelos (born August 24, 1951, New York, New York, U.S.—died October 12, 2013, New York) was an American novelist, the son of Cuban immigrants, whose writing chronicles the pre-Castro Cuban immigrant experience in the United States, particularly in New York City.

Hijuelos attended City College of the City University of New York, where he received a B.A. in 1975 and an M.A. in 1976. He won critical acclaim for his first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989; filmed as The Mambo Kings, 1992). Our House in the Last World concerns members of the immigrant Santinio family, who try to integrate into their Cuban identity and values the rhythms and culture of life in New York City’s Spanish Harlem. In the novel Hijuelos employed surreal effects suggestive of modern Latin American fiction. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love also chronicles Cuban immigrants, their quest for the American dream, and their eventual disillusionment. It vividly re-creates the musical and social environment of North America in the 1950s when the dance music of Cuban immigrants, the rumba and the mambo, began to achieve mainstream success.

Empress of the Splendid Season (1999) continues the examination of immigrant life, this time revealing the discrepancy between the characters’ rich self-images and their banal lives. In Beautiful María of My Soul; or, The True Story of María García y Cifuentes, the Lady Behind a Famous Song (2010), Hijuelos returned to the story of Maria, the muse of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, in order to examine the meaning of Cubanness, or Cubanía. His other novels include The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993); Mr. Ives’ Christmas (1995); A Simple Habana Melody (From When the World Was Good) (2002); Dark Dude (2008), a coming-of-age story; and Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise (2015), a fictionalized account of the friendship between American writer Mark Twain and British American explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Hijuelos also wrote the memoir Thoughts Without Cigarettes (2011).