Sample Famous Person Paragraph

Weekly Famous Person Assignment

Each week you will be researching a famous Hispanic individual and writing a summary about that person. This assignment will be submitted in the Google Classroom. The following paragraph is an example of what is expected for this assignment.

Oscar Hijuelos

Oscar Hijuelos is a novelist who was born in New York City in 1951.  His parents were from Cuba and wanted their son to have a strong understanding of his heritage. For this reason, they taught him only Spanish.  When Mr. Hijuelos was about four years old, he was diagnosed with a kidney disorder and he was placed in a home for terminally ill children.  The isolation that he felt during the two years that he was living in the home eventually led to his desire to express himself in writing.  After college, Oscar went to work for an advertising company and began writing short stories.  He went on to write The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.  The novel became a bestseller before being made into a movie.   Mr. Hijuelos was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this work in 1990 and he is still considered one of the primary voices of the experiences of Cubans emigrating to the United States.   His work is important to me because it provides an opportunity for me to understand what it was like for people who moved from Cuba to the United States.  In addition, the movie, Mambo Kings, led to a mambo revival, which re-introduced that style of music in the United States.