Oscar J. Hijuelos

The son of Cuban immigrants, Oscar Hijuelos lived here from 1951 to 1971, where he first began to write and play guitar and piano. Literature and music would be his life-long passions. A student at Bronx Community College, Manhattan Community College, and Lehman College before entering the City College of New York where he received his B.A. and M.F.A., he was the recipient of The Rome Prize for his first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983). Hijuelos became the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990 for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). He explored the immigrant experience and celebrated the Morningside Heights neighborhood in The Mambo Kings, which was adapted as a film in 1992 and a musical in 2005. In 1998, he married writer and editor Lori Marie Carlson.