A Study Guide for Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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A Study Guide for Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Gale
Novels for Students, Volume 36
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
JUNOT DÍAZ
2007
INTRODUCTION
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), the first novel by the Dominican American author Junot Díaz, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008 and is one of the most acclaimed works of literature of the early twenty-first century. Díaz spent the first seven years of his life in humble circumstances in the Dominican Republic, then moved to New Jersey and underwent the sort of crash course in assimilation experienced by many immigrants. Alwaysan avid reader, Díazconsumed comic books in his youth, moved on to fantasy and sci-fi novels and horror fiction by high school, and from there delved into serious literature. Following graduate school, he made his own mark on the literary world with Drown (1996), a short-story collection narrated by the streetwise Yunior, who tells of his experience growing up without a father, first in the Dominican Republic and then in New Jersey. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior returns to tell the story of Oscar de Léon, a fat sci-fi-reading nerd
whose solitary life is marked by romantic despair—and who may be weighed down by a curse wrought upon his family by the dictator Rafael Trujillo, who was crossed by Oscar's grandfather.
It should be noted that in relating the stories of Oscar, his sister, his mother, and his grandfather, the novel includes several extremely violent episodes, occasionally graphic discussions of sexual encounters, and brief mentions of drug use, and the narrator uses a contemporary vernacular, mixing Spanish with English, that features frequent profanity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on December 31, 1968, and raised in the Villa Juana neighborhood as the third of five children. His father, a military police officer who was usually stationed in the United States, raised his children under strict discipline and preached a strong work ethic; he also encouraged his boys to fight with neighbors in order to toughen up. For the first six years of his life, Díaz knew a city with few modern conveniences, with running