It was just an ordinary day on April 9th for 39-year-old Junot Diaz, a creative writing professor at MIT who didn’t know he won the nation’s highest literary award. He was helping his mother pack for her six-month trip to the Dominican Republic, enjoying the few moments they had left with each other. He played with his young nephew who, like any mischievous child, was pulling out his grandmother’s belongings from her suitcases. The phone began ringing and a friend revealed that his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Diaz, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic at age six to New Jersey, often escaped from his life living on the borders of a landfill, to the library where he satisfied his love for reading. Today, he’s known as one of the most influential writers of the 21st century.
Diaz, who spent 12 years writing Oscar Wao since his 1996 short-story collection Drown, was the second Latino to ever win the Pulitzer. Despite his success, he insists that life hasn’t changed since he first heard the news. “In the end, it’s not winning the lottery or selling three million books,” he chuckles. “I think it impresses most writers, but the average person doesn’t know or care.” Despite his modesty, Diaz’s triumph as a writer is anything but. Throughout 2008, he traveled from Central Park’s Summerstage where he was greeted by hundreds of fans who waited hours just to hear him read an unfinished manuscript, to Italy, where he was a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. However, this isn’t enough for Diaz, an author who, during the last six months of writing his book, drank up to 10 cans of soda a day just to stay energized. “Even if nothing had happened, I’m just a perfectionist,” he declares. I always push myself and it’s probably going to kill me before I’m 50.” Although he claims that the characters behind Oscar Wao are all works of fiction, he makes no hesitation in exploring the Dominican Republic’s most notorious dictator.
Oscar Wao introduces readers to the laugh-out-loud, painfully tragic Cabral family including Oscar, a 250-pound lovesick “ghetto nerd” obsessed with comics and a prostitute, his rebellious sister Lola, a punk rocker who runs away with her boyfriend, and their hard-as-nails mother Hypatía. However, the real Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo takes center stage. While he faced criticism from peers on choosing to write about the man behind the island‘s bloody 30-year regime, he felt that his readers wouldn‘t have difficulty reading up on the history of the Dominican Republic. “You have to cover all sorts of resistance from the older generation who don’t want to see or hear anything about Trujillo,” he explains. “Then again, if you try to please other people who just don’t want to hear stuff, you end up writing nothing.” At least for now, Diaz can figure out what to begin working on next.
Although Miramax Films bought the screening rights to Diaz’s bestseller, he states that there’s no news of when readers can march to theaters for the book’s film adaptation. His goal is to develop a conversation with all people, despite where they come from. “Who wouldn’t want their entire country to love you, throw flowers, and swear by your book the way 15th century monks did with the bible?” he says. “But art isn’t about that. If art is just about popularity, you wouldn’t take any risks.” Fortunately, it took a professor passionate about writing to take a chance in sharing a story of immigration, discovering freedom, and willing to lose it all for love, to get thousands reading.
