Oscar Hijuelos (1951–2013) was the internationally bestselling author of 8 novels, including The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, for which he became the first Latino American novelist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He also received the Rome Prize and prestigious grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Born in Manhattan in 1951, he lived in New York City until his passing in 2013.