OSCAR HIJUELOS
Birth: August 24, 1951 in New York, New York, United States
Occupation: novelist, college teacher, manager
The novel of immigrant life is a durable and extremely significant tradition in
American literature, and Cuban-American writer Oscar Hijuelos has emerged as one
of its top recent practitioners. His 1989 novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of
Love was both a prizewinner and a bestseller; in that work and in several other
substantial novels Hijuelos has explored the worlds of Cuban-born and Cuban-descended
characters who live in the major cities of the U.S. eastern seaboard. "Oscar
Hijuelos," noted the National Review, "forces the Hispanic immigrant experience
close to the center of our cultural consciousness, where it very much deserves
to be."
Born in New York on August 24, 1951, Hijuelos was the son of a Cuban-born hotel
worker. In the years before the takeover by Communist strongman Fidel Castro the
family occasionally returned to Cuba. On one of those trips Hijuelos became
seriously ill and had to spend several months in a Connecticut children's
hospital upon his return. Hijuelos was a product of New York's public education
system through the Master's degree level, graduating from the City University of
New York in 1975 and gaining his M.A. in creative writing a year later. Among
his early influences as a writer were the novelist Henry Roth, who had
chronicled the experiences of Jewish immigrants, and the minimalist short-story
craftsman Donald Barthelme.
Worked in Advertising Firm
Hijuelos, however, evolved into a writer who was no minimalist, but rather has
been noted for his rich, detailed descriptions of Cuban-American life. He honed
his craft over a period seven years, from 1977 to 1984, during which he worked
in an advertising office and wrote fiction by night. Working in the short story
genre at first, Hijuelos found gradually increasing recognition for his works.
He landed a group of stories in the 1978 anthology Best of Pushcart Press III.
That led to a series of small 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 in Vermont.
The first fruit of Hijuelos's long apprenticeship was the novel Our House in the
Last World, published in 1983. That book, which included an episode paralleling
its author's own childhood hospitalization, depicts the lives of the members of
a Cuban-American family in New York's Spanish Harlem neighborhood in the 1940s.
Told through the eyes of the youngest son, the story reflects issues common to
American immigrants: the pull of assimilation versus the barriers of
discrimination and separateness, and the ambivalent attitudes immigrants may
have toward their home cultures. In Our House in the Last World (the "Last World"
refers to Cuba), those ambivalent attitudes crystallize around the family's
attitudes toward the alcoholic father, Alejo Santinio, whose errant ways leave
them trapped in poverty.
Our House in the Last World brought Hijuelos few general readers but plenty of
critical attention, and in 1985 he won a National Endowment for the Arts
fellowship. The fellowship enabled him to devote full time to the research into
1950s Cuban music that would underlie his sophomore release, The Mambo Kings
Play Songs of Love. Published in 1989, that book remains his best known work.
Tailor-made for cinematic adaptation (a film version starring Armand Assante
brought the film's musical world to life in the early 1990s), The Mambo Kings
Play Songs of Love tells the story of two Cuban brothers, Cesar and Nestor
Castillo, who move to New York in the early 1950s and establish a mambo
orchestra.
Novel Featured Desi Arnaz as Character
One technique Hijuelos used to add realism to his depiction of the heavily Latin-tinged
musical world of the 1950s was the inclusion of real-life individuals as
characters--most significantly Latin star Desi Arnaz (the brothers make an
appearance on the I Love Lucy television program). Such realistic touches, and a
prose style that itself evoked Cuban rhythms, contributed to the book's success
but ironically landed Hijuelos in court: Gloria Parker, leader of a group called
Glorious Gloria Parker and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra alleged that an
unflattering character in the book was based on her own, and sued Hijuelos for
defamation of character. Closely watched as the first case of its kind to
involve a work of fiction, the lawsuit was dismissed in 1991.
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of
Love played in important part in kicking off the 1990s renaissance in Latin
American fiction. "I remember being told, when the novel came out, 'Minority
novels don't sell. Period.'" Hijuelos told Publishers Weekly. "That's what you
hear if you're Hispanic. 'Punto. Forget it, baby.'" But The Mambo Kings Play
Songs of Love enjoyed strong support from its publisher and by early 1991 had
more than 200,000 copies in print. "The book is overcoming a very subtle kind of
bias people have about what they'll find in a Latino book--more drudgery, death,
and taxes." Hijuelos reflected in the same interview.
After the long years he spent mastering the writing craft, Hijuelos was in no
danger of suffering the kind of post-smash slump that has sometimes affected
other young writers. His novels of the 1990s were a varied group in both subject
matter and technique. The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993) was
set in rural Pennsylvania in the early 20th century and depicted the large and
predominately female offspring of an Irish-American father and a Cuban-American
mother. Though some reviewers complained that the large cast of characters
reduced some of the characterizations to shorthand, it was becoming increasingly
clear that Hijuelos was claiming for his own large swaths of the American
experience that earlier Hispanic writers had not dealt with.
The lyrical and spiritual novel Mr Ives' Christmas (1995) strengthened that
impression with its presentation of a main character who finds redemption after
his son is randomly murdered during the holiday season. A successful executive
who grew up in poverty, Ives, the novel suggests, comes from a Hispanic
background. But the novel was aimed at general audiences and was reviewed from
that perspective. In 1999 Hijuelos struck a balance between his Cuban roots and
his interest in American society in general with the novel Empress of the
Splendid Season; the book told the story of a Cuban-American housecleaner and
the varied American lives into which her work has given her a window. Perhaps
just reaching his prime in the early 21st century, despite all the success he
had already achieved, Hijuelos seemed ready to say much more to the nation of
immigrants that his family had adopted as home.
Birth: August 24, 1951 in New York, New York, United States
Occupation: novelist, college teacher, manager
The novel of immigrant life is a durable and extremely significant tradition in
American literature, and Cuban-American writer Oscar Hijuelos has emerged as one
of its top recent practitioners. His 1989 novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of
Love was both a prizewinner and a bestseller; in that work and in several other
substantial novels Hijuelos has explored the worlds of Cuban-born and Cuban-descended
characters who live in the major cities of the U.S. eastern seaboard. "Oscar
Hijuelos," noted the National Review, "forces the Hispanic immigrant experience
close to the center of our cultural consciousness, where it very much deserves
to be."
Born in New York on August 24, 1951, Hijuelos was the son of a Cuban-born hotel
worker. In the years before the takeover by Communist strongman Fidel Castro the
family occasionally returned to Cuba. On one of those trips Hijuelos became
seriously ill and had to spend several months in a Connecticut children's
hospital upon his return. Hijuelos was a product of New York's public education
system through the Master's degree level, graduating from the City University of
New York in 1975 and gaining his M.A. in creative writing a year later. Among
his early influences as a writer were the novelist Henry Roth, who had
chronicled the experiences of Jewish immigrants, and the minimalist short-story
craftsman Donald Barthelme.
Worked in Advertising Firm
Hijuelos, however, evolved into a writer who was no minimalist, but rather has
been noted for his rich, detailed descriptions of Cuban-American life. He honed
his craft over a period seven years, from 1977 to 1984, during which he worked
in an advertising office and wrote fiction by night. Working in the short story
genre at first, Hijuelos found gradually increasing recognition for his works.
He landed a group of stories in the 1978 anthology Best of Pushcart Press III.
That led to a series of small 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 in Vermont.
The first fruit of Hijuelos's long apprenticeship was the novel Our House in the
Last World, published in 1983. That book, which included an episode paralleling
its author's own childhood hospitalization, depicts the lives of the members of
a Cuban-American family in New York's Spanish Harlem neighborhood in the 1940s.
Told through the eyes of the youngest son, the story reflects issues common to
American immigrants: the pull of assimilation versus the barriers of
discrimination and separateness, and the ambivalent attitudes immigrants may
have toward their home cultures. In Our House in the Last World (the "Last World"
refers to Cuba), those ambivalent attitudes crystallize around the family's
attitudes toward the alcoholic father, Alejo Santinio, whose errant ways leave
them trapped in poverty.
Our House in the Last World brought Hijuelos few general readers but plenty of
critical attention, and in 1985 he won a National Endowment for the Arts
fellowship. The fellowship enabled him to devote full time to the research into
1950s Cuban music that would underlie his sophomore release, The Mambo Kings
Play Songs of Love. Published in 1989, that book remains his best known work.
Tailor-made for cinematic adaptation (a film version starring Armand Assante
brought the film's musical world to life in the early 1990s), The Mambo Kings
Play Songs of Love tells the story of two Cuban brothers, Cesar and Nestor
Castillo, who move to New York in the early 1950s and establish a mambo
orchestra.
Novel Featured Desi Arnaz as Character
One technique Hijuelos used to add realism to his depiction of the heavily Latin-tinged
musical world of the 1950s was the inclusion of real-life individuals as
characters--most significantly Latin star Desi Arnaz (the brothers make an
appearance on the I Love Lucy television program). Such realistic touches, and a
prose style that itself evoked Cuban rhythms, contributed to the book's success
but ironically landed Hijuelos in court: Gloria Parker, leader of a group called
Glorious Gloria Parker and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra alleged that an
unflattering character in the book was based on her own, and sued Hijuelos for
defamation of character. Closely watched as the first case of its kind to
involve a work of fiction, the lawsuit was dismissed in 1991.
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of
Love played in important part in kicking off the 1990s renaissance in Latin
American fiction. "I remember being told, when the novel came out, 'Minority
novels don't sell. Period.'" Hijuelos told Publishers Weekly. "That's what you
hear if you're Hispanic. 'Punto. Forget it, baby.'" But The Mambo Kings Play
Songs of Love enjoyed strong support from its publisher and by early 1991 had
more than 200,000 copies in print. "The book is overcoming a very subtle kind of
bias people have about what they'll find in a Latino book--more drudgery, death,
and taxes." Hijuelos reflected in the same interview.
After the long years he spent mastering the writing craft, Hijuelos was in no
danger of suffering the kind of post-smash slump that has sometimes affected
other young writers. His novels of the 1990s were a varied group in both subject
matter and technique. The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993) was
set in rural Pennsylvania in the early 20th century and depicted the large and
predominately female offspring of an Irish-American father and a Cuban-American
mother. Though some reviewers complained that the large cast of characters
reduced some of the characterizations to shorthand, it was becoming increasingly
clear that Hijuelos was claiming for his own large swaths of the American
experience that earlier Hispanic writers had not dealt with.
The lyrical and spiritual novel Mr Ives' Christmas (1995) strengthened that
impression with its presentation of a main character who finds redemption after
his son is randomly murdered during the holiday season. A successful executive
who grew up in poverty, Ives, the novel suggests, comes from a Hispanic
background. But the novel was aimed at general audiences and was reviewed from
that perspective. In 1999 Hijuelos struck a balance between his Cuban roots and
his interest in American society in general with the novel Empress of the
Splendid Season; the book told the story of a Cuban-American housecleaner and
the varied American lives into which her work has given her a window. Perhaps
just reaching his prime in the early 21st century, despite all the success he
had already achieved, Hijuelos seemed ready to say much more to the nation of
immigrants that his family had adopted as home.