Pulitzer Prize Winning Novelist Oscar Hijuelos Dead at 62
Posted on October 14, 2013
Cuban-American author Oscar Hijuelos has died suddenly at the age of 62. Hijuelos was the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The New York Times reports that Hijuelos was playing tennis when he collapsed. He never regained consciousness.
Hijuelos wrote often about the life of Cuban-Americans and their struggle to assimilate into American life. Hijuelos won the the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1989 novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. The book was made into a movie starring Antonio Banderas and Armand Assanti as the Castillo brothers, two Cuban American brothers who went to Manhattan to make it big in the music industry. His other novels included Our House in the Last World, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, Mr. Ives's Christmas, Empress of the Splendid Season, and A Simple Habana Melody (From When the World was Good). In 2011 he published his memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes.
