Oscar Hijuelos, Cuban-American Pulitzer Winner Novelist, Dies At 62

Oscar Hijuelos, a Cuban-American novelist, author of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love," died Sunday after he collapsed on a tennis court and never regained consciousness, according to his agent, Jennifer Lyons. He was 62. Hijuelos became the first Latino who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990, and his novel told the story of two Cuban brothers who emigrated to New York to try to make it as musicians in the 1950s. At one point in the story, the brothers appear on the television comedy "I Love Lucy," which starred Lucille Ball and her Cuban bandleader husband, Desi Arnaz. The book was eventually turned into a movie starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas.

In 2009, Hijuelos had opened up about "Mambo Kings" to CNN's Don Lemon, telling him he had nothing to lose when he wrote the book. "I never even thought that book would get published when I first wrote it, and because of that -- having been poor in the first place -- I had nothing to lose. And not having expected it to be published, I had felt enormous amounts of freedom." He said his book seemed to help open doors for other writers. "The truth is that before that period, that book really, there were very few publishing houses in New York City dealing or publishing main -- you know, Latino writers. I mean, it was a very -- I can barely think of any titles. Most Latino authors were being published out of university presses or small presses," he said.

Hijuelos was raised in a vibrant multicultural neighborhood. He attended the City College of New York, where he took classes from Susan Sontag and Donald Barthelme. He was also exposed to Cuban and Latin American writers including Jose Lezama Lima, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes, whose work inspired him. Unlike many well-known Latino writers, his work was rarely outwardly political, focusing instead on the struggles and adventures of the protagonists, which he wrote in fluid prose, with a forthright American cadence. And although he didn't speak Spanish, "When I heard Spanish, I found my heart warming. And that was the moment when I began to look through another window, not out onto 118th Street, but into myself - through my writing, the process by which, for all my earlier alienation, I had finally returned home," he wrote in The New York Times in 2011.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Hijuelos was the recipient of a number of prestigious literary awards, including the Rome Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.