This is a guest blog by Barbara Bair, historian of Literature, Culture, and the Arts in the Manuscript Division.
In 1990, author Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013) became the first Hispanic American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). He later received the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature in 2000. His newly acquired papers are now open for research use in the Manuscript Division Reading Room at the Library of Congress.
The Oscar Hijuelos Papers contain correspondence, notes and notebooks, draft essays, biographical sketches, scripts, screenplays, short stories, speeches, outlines, interviews, photographs, travel material, and other items documenting the writing and teaching careers, family, and personal life of Hijuelos.
Hijuelos was born and raised in the ethnically diverse Morningside Heights neighborhood of West Harlem, the son of émigré Cuban working-class parents. He was educated at Catholic and public schools in the city and attended night school and classes at community colleges before graduating with degrees in English from the City College of New York (1975 B.A., 1976 M.A.). At CCNY he received important mentoring from several professors, including essayist Susan Sontag and short fiction master Donald Barthelme.
His largely autobiographical first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), was based on his youth and family history. It includes accounts of a pivotal early childhood trip to Cuba, a subsequent illness, and later experiences with relatives in Miami and New York. He framed the novel around the story of his parents’ c