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Pulitzer prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos died on Saturday when he had a heart attack while playing tennis, his agent confirmed to the Associated Press. Hijuelos, a Cuban-American who was born and raised in New York, won his fiction Pulitzer for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which followed a pair of musician brothers from Havana to New York. He was the first Hispanic writer to win the Pulitzer fiction prize, and the book was turned into a movie and almost became a musical. It remains Hijuelos’s most well-known work, though he wrote several other novels plus a memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes. Hijuelos is survived by his wife, Lori Marie Carlson.
