April 6, 7:45 p.m.

On Mr. Ives' Christmas: "Stunning…a triumph…with an honesty at its core that seems almost shocking in this day and age." --Boston Glove

Oscar Hijuelos was born to Cuban immigrants in 1951 on the Upper West Side of New York City, a neighborhood which continues to influence and shape his writing. After college at the City College of New York, he worked in an advertising agency, writing his first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), in his spare time. That novel won him the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rome Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Ingram-Merrill fellowship, grants which allowed him to leave his job and concentrate on his second novel, The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love. The latter won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and went on to become a national and international best-seller as well as the basis for a major Hollywood film.
Oscar Hijuelos is a writer of many registers. Of his third novel, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, the Chicago Tribune wrote, "Nobody writes about sensuality, nostalgia, and matters of the heart more exuberantly than Oscar Hijuelos." By contrast, his Dickensian novel Mr. Ives' Christmas (1996) is a quietly beautiful story of spiritual rebirth, "the deepest and the best of Hijuelos' novels," according to the New York Times. At Seton Hall, he will read from both earlier work and his latest novel, Empress of the Splendid Season, to be published in February 1999.