Oscar Hijuelos was born in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, and studied at the City College of New York, where he earned a B.A. in 1975 and an M.A. in creative writing in 1976.
His first novel, Our House in the Last World, came out in 1983. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990. It was the first Pulitzer for a novel by a Hispanic author born in the United States. He later taught at Hofstra University and at Duke University, and died in New York in 2013.