Oscar Hijuelos, a Cuban-American novelist who wrote about the lives of immigrants adapting to a new culture and became the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1989 book, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 62.
Mr. Hijuelos collapsed on a tennis court and never regained consciousness, his wife, Lori Marie Carlson, said.
A New Yorker by birth, education and residence, Mr. Hijuelos (pronounced ee-HWAY-los) was said to have been more American-Cuban than Cuban-American.
In novels like “Our House in the Last World” (1983), which traces a family’s travails from Havana in 1939 to Spanish Harlem; “Mambo Kings,” about the rise and fall of the Castillo brothers, Cesar, a flamboyant and profligate bandleader, and his ruminative trumpeter brother, Nestor; and “The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien” (1993), about several generations of a Cuban-Irish family in Pennsylvania, he wrote about the non-native experience in the United States from a sympathetic, occasionally amused perspective and with a keen eye for detail in his period settings.
Unlike that of many well-known Latin writers, his work was rarely outwardly political, focusing instead on the conundrums of assimilation. And rather than employing a syncopated musicality or fantastical flights of magic realism, Mr. Hijuelos wrote fluid prose, sonorous but more earthy than poetic, with a forthright American cadence.
Oscar Jerome Hijuelos was born in Manhattan on Aug. 24, 1951, and grew up in the borough’s northern Morningside Heights neighborhood that later often figured in his books. His parents, Pascual, a cook at the Biltmore Hotel, and Magdalena Torrens Hijuelos, emigrated from Cuba in the 1940s.
The family spoke Spanish at home, and young Oscar became fluent in English only after a 1955 visit to Cuba, where he contracted a severe kidney infection that required him to spend a year away from his family in a Connecticut hospital.
“It was during that long separation from my family that I became estranged from the Spanish language and, therefore, my roots,” he wrote in a 2011 essay in The New York Times.
Mr. Hijuelos graduated from Louis D. Brandeis High School in Manhattan and attended several colleges in New York City, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree and a Master of Fine Arts from City College. “Our House in the Last World,” his first novel, was published in 1983.
SOURCE: The New York Times