Pulitzer Price Author
ALA Best Books for Young Adults
International Latino Book Award
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee

     Rico Fuentes is a “fish-out-of-water” because his skin is too light for the New York ghetto and his Latin roots are too loud for the prejudices in rural America.
     From Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos comes an unforgettable journey about identity, choices, and the way in which we all struggle to accept our true selves.
     In gritty, clear prose, Dark Dude captures New York City in the 1960s—violent, decaying, slouching away from the American dream—and brings to life a character who has no choice but to head out west in search of something better.
     In an effort to escape the violence and decay New York City in the 1960s, at the ripe old age of 15, Rico Fuentes heads out West looking for the American Dream.
     In the Midwest, Rico could blend in, his light hair and lighter skin disguising his background. He would no longer be the "dark dude", the punching bag for the whole neighborhood.
     Trading Harlem for Wisconsin, though, means giving up on a big part of his identity. And when Rico no longer has to prove that he’s Latino, he almost stops being one.
     But the light hair Cuban-American youngster, and his multi-colored skin friends, soon find that the white picket-fenced rural Wisconsin community can be as cruel and judgmental as the one he fled from in the eastern city ghetto because there are some things that can’t be left behind, things that will follow you a thousand miles away.
     Then he is forced to swallow an uncomfortable truth: no longer an outsider by his appearance, Rico is still an outsider. It is a vibrant, gritty and funny rite of passage account.
     The prized author Oscar Hijuelos explores the universal theme of self identity demonstrating through Rico’s ordeals that who you are has nothing to do with where you are or how you look. Rico’s journey of self acceptance is not unlike the one embarked on by the millions of Latins who live in the United States.

     AudioFile: "With parallels to Huck Finn’s journey, Rico’s story of self-discovery is skillfully chronicled by Armando Durán, whose ease with accents is noteworthy. He seamlessly delivers the many Spanish phrases interspersed throughout the text and conveys Rico’s sense of alienation and bewilderment when he experiences injustice and random violence in the rural Midwestern community."
     Publishers Weekly (starred review): "... themes are classic—alienation, the search for identity—but his approach is pure Hijuelos: Cuban-American, musical and very, very funny...he inevitability of the conclusion doesn’t matter: it’s the smooth, jazzy flow of the narration, the slides between Rico’s rootlessness and the book’s strong sense of place that count."
     Booklist (starred review): "Hijuelos proves himself to be a powerful, adept storyteller for teens...Frank, gritty, vibrant, and wholly absorbing, Rico’s story will hold teens with its celebration of friendship and its fundamental questions about life purpose, family responsibility, and the profound ways that experience shapes identity."
     KLIATT: "High school readers will appreciate the struggles and the humor of being a fish out of water."

     For 18 years was the first and only Latino writer ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
     Hijuelos was born in New York City, in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, to Cuban immigrant parents.
     His first novel, "Our House in the Last World", was published in 1983 and received the 1985 Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Rome.
     His second novel, "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love", received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was adapted for the film "The Mambo Kings" in 1992 and as a Broadway musical in 2005.
     His five previous novels have been translated into twenty-five languages.
     Hijuelos has taught at Hofstra University and is currently affiliated with Duke University, where he is a member of the faculty of the Department of English.

     He has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast.
     For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
     A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.