Born in New York in 1951, Oscar Hijuelos published his first novel, “Our House in the Last World”, in 1983. An autobiographical tale about life in America and his homeland of Cuba as the ultimate world, the novel received rave reviews and earned Hijuelos many prestigious awards including the Rome Prize for Literature. Reminiscing about stories of Cuba he heard as a child. Hijuelos began to work on his next project. In 1989, he published the best seller, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” a story of two Cuban immigrants musicians who dream of scoring big in New York City. With its publication, Hijuelos became the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature; two years later, his novel was made into the motion-picture hit “Mambo Kings.”