Oscar Hijuelos was born August 24, 1951 in New York City, the son of José Hijuelos, a hotel worker, and Magdalena Torrens, a homemaker. Both had immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba. He attended NYC public schools then received his bachelor of arts degree in 1975 and his masters in English and writing in 1976 from City College. One of his teachers in the writing program was short-story writer, Donald Barthelme.
After graduation, Hijuelos worked at an advertising media company from 1977 to 1985. He wrote short stories in his spare time, some of them published in the Best of Pushcart Press III in 1978. One of his stories, Columbus Discovering America, received an outstanding writer citation from Pushcart Press in 1978. This led to an Oscar Cintas fiction writing grant and, in 1980, a Breadloaf Writers Conference scholarship.
Our House in the Last World was published in 1983. Like many first books, it was probably autobiographical, the story of a Cuban immigrant family in America in the 1940s. The book allowed him to examine his feelings about his Cuban heritage. Critics praised the book for being warm and vibrant. It was a departure from the usual book by Cuban-American writers that focused on political issues. In 1983, Hijuelos received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His second book, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, was published in 1989. The story of two brothers, Nestor and Cesar Castillo, who moved from Havana to New York in the 1950s, was nominated for a National Book Critics Award and the National Book Award from the National Book Foundation. The following year, 1990, the work earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He was the first Hispanic writer to win what is considered the highest national award for excellence in journalism, literary achievements and music.
The Pulitzer is named after Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-Jewish-American journalist and newspaper publisher (St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York World. New York World ran the first newspaper comic printed in color in 1895 and became the largest paper in the country.
Columbia declined Pulitzer’s money when he first offered it in 1895 to set up a school of journalism because Seth Low, Columbia’s president, didn’t want to associate the school with Pulitzer’s unscrupulous reputation. New York World competed with the William Hearst’s New York Journal, especially during the Spanish-American War, and was accused of yellow journalism. In 1902, the new Columbia president was more open to the donation (time softens our scruples, doesn’t it?) but it was not until after Pulitzer’s death that his dream to be memorialized by the two-million-dollar he had left in his will was realized. Columbia created its now famous Graduate School of Journalism in 1912.
Pulitzer, apparently anxious to leave a positive memorial to his success in America, had earlier successfully induced the University of Missouri to create the Missouri School of Journalism so his legacy includes two of the most prestigious schools for journalism in the country.
Columbia started awarding the Pulitzer Prize in 1917. Pulitzer died six years earlier, in 1911, on his private yacht en route to his winter home on Jekyll Island, Georgia.
Our lives are strangely interconnected, links we don’t see until some time has passed and we can see these lives as though from outer space in its greater totality, its edges and center visible at last. Hijuelos, a Cuban, won a literary award funded by Pulitzer who made much of his money from reportage of the Spanish-American War when America first encountered Cuba and by the end of the war had evicted the Spaniards from the hemisphere.Hispanic came to mean not the Spaniards but the people they had colonized and with whom they’d left their genes, language and culture.
The prize for excellence created from the wealth of a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant routinely went to Anglo writers. Hijuelos broke that mold and became the first Latino to win this recognition of mastery in the use of the English language. No Filipino has ever won the award. For that reason alone might one born in the islands dream of someday breaking the mold. Like Pulitzer, when we begin to realize that our lives are not endless, we seek to leave something of our lives when we finally must let life go.
Memory: it's the stuff of dreams, of art, and, for better or for worse, the life we grow to believe we must live.
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