Oscar Hijuelos won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
Hijuelos’s 1989 novel follows César and Néstor Castillo, Cuban immigrant brothers who perform Latin music in New York City. Their story moves between family memory, cultural identity, music, love, and the pressures of immigrant life in the United States.
The award made Hijuelos the first Hispanic writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel’s title refers to the brothers’ musical ambitions and to the broader mambo culture associated with New York’s mid-century Latin music scene. Readers sometimes confuse the book with its 1992 film adaptation, The Mambo Kings, which starred Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas.
Hijuelos was born in New York City in 1951 to Cuban immigrant parents. His work helped bring Cuban American experiences and bilingual cultural memory into the center of American literary fiction.