09 April 2008
Dominican-American Author Junot Diaz Wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Writer’s first novel explores bicultural life of immigrant family in New Jersey
Washington -- The September 2007 publication of Junot Diaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, secured the reputation of its Dominican-American author as a singular talent with a highly original literary voice. That reputation was confirmed by the announcement, on April 9, 2008, that Diaz’s novel had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction -- just one month after it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
When his previous book (Drown, a collection of short stories) appeared in 1996, Diaz attracted attention as an up-and-coming writer to watch for. Following that triumph, he began working on a science fiction novel -- still unfinished -- before writing Oscar Wao, which was 10 years in the making. Diaz’s new novel follows the trials and tribulations of Dominican-American family members in their native country and in their adopted hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. The novel’s title refers to the Spanish pronunciation of “Oscar Wilde,” the 19th-century Anglo-Irish writer and dandy whose moniker serves as a nickname for Diaz’s teenage narrator, Oscar de Leon.
Although Diaz has been reluctant to describe his novel as autobiographical, his own bicultural background clearly informs the novel’s setting and complex family dynamics. Born in Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic’s capital city), Diaz emigrated to the United States at age 6, growing up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey. Like his novel’s protagonist, Oscar, he was a self-styled “ghetto nerd” whose love of books -- particularly science fiction -- made him a frequent target of his classmates’ taunts.
By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Oscar Wao explores the duality of the immigrant experience in America, exemplified in different ways by Oscar’s mother, Belicia, his sister Lola and Oscar himself. Oscar’s role as a social misfit is underscored by the novel’s allusions to science fiction characters from the Star Trek television series, Star Wars movies, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Of the pudgy, book-obsessed Oscar, Diaz writes: “Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber. … Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.”
Reviewers have consistently cited Oscar Wao as one of the best books of 2007. The novel’s language, punctuated by a liberal use of Spanish-American slang, is “a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale,” according to New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani. Critic Lev Grossman, writing for Time magazine, praised Diaz’s novel as “astoundingly great,” adding: “You could call The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao … the saga of an immigrant family, but that wouldn’t really be fair. It’s an immigrant-family saga for people who don’t read immigrant-family sagas.”
The success of Oscar Wao crowns the author’s unlikely path from his modest beginnings to literary prominence. In 1992, Diaz earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Rutgers College, financing his education by delivering pool tables, washing dishes, pumping gas and working at a steel mill. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1995. Diaz, age 39, now teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dividing his time between Boston and New York. He also is a founding member of the Voices Workshop that organizes summer writing programs for writers of color.
A few months before winning the Pulitzer Prize, Diaz sold the film rights to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to the Miramax film studio.
In a September 2007 interview with Bloomberg News Services reporter Robert Hilferty, Diaz said he considers himself fortunate to be able to make a living from his writing. “I have an imaginative life,” he said. “Very few people can live off that in this world.”
See also: “ U.S. Politics, Literature, Sports Show Cultural Influence of Hispanics,” as well as Diversity and The Arts..
