Annal:1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1990. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love: A Novel
- 1990 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1989 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.4
It’s 1949. It’s the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth—a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep afection. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos has created a rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss, memory and desire.
- 1990 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1989 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 1990 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1989 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.4
In 1930’s New York, Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old high-school dropout, has captured the attention of infamous gangster Dutch Schultz, who lures the boy into his world of racketeering. The product of an East Bronx upbringing by his half-crazy Irish Catholic mother, after his Jewish father left them long ago, Billy is captivated by the world of money, sex, and high society the charismatic Schultz has to offer. But it is also a world of extortion, brutality, and murder, where Billy finds himself involved in a dangerous affair with Schultz’s girlfriend. Relive…
