Junot Diaz: From Santo Domingo to 'Drown' - Research Paper

Introduction

Junot Diaz was born in the town of Santo Domingo in the Republic of Dominican. He has four siblings, being born third youth. The debut novel that he authored was called Drown and it was published in 1996. The novel became popular in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. The setting of the novel was the ghetto and it was authored in American English, barrio and has articulations in Spanish. The novel is a representation that meters the relationship between Diaz and his father. Diaz does not have a very friendly relationship with his father, whom he does not keep tabs with. There was a time his father sent a letter critiquing negatively an article written by Diaz in the Dominican Newspaper. The emotions displayed in Drown are fragile and the creativity exhibited in the story is extraordinary. The novel is engaging and unflinchingly serious.

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Since childhood, Diaz has been attributed to the ability of voracious reading. He attended Elementary school of Madison Park, after which he went to Cedar Ridge Highschool. Between Elementary and Highschool, Diaz was fascinated by fictional movies and films concerning apocalypse. For example Edge of darkness. He began his university education in Kean college in New Jersey and later transferred to Rutgers University. The subject he majored in was English and throughout the university, he got exposed to a lot of writing. He met renowned authors like Cisneros. His life in college was not that simple since he was studying and working at the same time. Junot worked very hard when it came to writing. He wrote every day from his desk starting from 7 a.m. On an average day, he wrote for about eight or more hours. The writing was something that he was so passionate about that he scribbled down notes about the book everywhere; in the toilet, on the train, on the bed and even at the dinner table. Despite doing all this, nothing seemed to work. His first book which was a collection of stories did not even go beyond 75 pages. Nothing made sense in his writes once he surpassed the 75-page mark. There were these other options of things he could do besides writing but nothing deterred his dream as a writer. Junot kept writing hitting the 75-page mark for 5 years. Failing on the daily was something he got used to but his ambition was more stubborn than the number of times he failed. Failing repeatedly and learning from his failures turned hi into one hard-hearted character who had this huge psyche. He knew that he had to do something to change the course of his writing career because then he was living with his fiancee. Junot got depressed and this made his fiancee ask him to write a list of other things he could do comfortably asides writing. He considered this of which narrowed down in into a list of three things. He did not have a lot of other skills. His motivation to read and write eventually was suffocated. The fights that crept between him and his fiancee stopped.

He graduated from Rutgers and got his first job as an editorial assistant in the press of Rutgers University. At Cornell, Diaz pursued a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing. It was there that he began to make the short stories that over the long haul molded his conveyed variety called Drown. As an assistant, he created a character called Yunior, who was used in his sequel of stories. Yunior became the center of his writes. The two writes that made Diaz famous are ''Drown" and "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao". Drown got acknowledgment from various sources, and soon Diaz was more notable in the masterful world than he anytime imagined he would be. The book was in like manner translated over into Spanish and disseminated all over (Neilson, Jim, 2014). Diaz had a two-book deal and a six-figure advance. Nevertheless, after his thriving, Diaz imagined that it was difficult to write. It took Diaz another eleven years before he decided that he would complete another work of inventive fiction. The subsequent book was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It is the record of a ghetto nerd and the criticize that has tormented his family for a very long time. The epic got to such a degree, or continuously, fundamental endorsement than Drown and won different distinctions.

Diaz is known for his additional record style and his steady joining of Spanish into his English nuance. Both Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao research the ruthlessness history of the Dominican Republic, and the violence that occurs on a customary reason in the lives of the characters (Obejas, Achy 2009). In the wake of the novel, Diaz has been the recipient of various distinctions and affiliations, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize. Diaz is an educator of Creative Writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lives in Boston. Diaz released another short story combination titled This Is How You Lose Her, which has gotten an uncommon amount of praise and affirmation from intellectuals all through the world. In the short story compilation, Diaz uses his capacity to elucidate the ghostly and unfathomable power of fondness. Like Drown, this is an achievement of contemporary composition. His short stories have appeared in platforms like The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The Best American Short Stories. Most starting late Diaz disseminated Islandborn, a youths' book that relates to the record of a Dominican child in the United States to bring his longstanding requests of character, having a spot, and home to another gathering of observers.

Diaz's works have won him a lot of prizes and made a name for him. One of his recent achievements is one where he shared a stage with other speakers at the CEMEX Auditorium as a part of the Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts. The event is overseen by the Stanford Humanities Center and financed by the Office of the President. He is also the recipient of Pulitzer prize, MacArthur 'Virtuoso' Fellowship, Hispanic Heritage Foundation Award for Literature, Henry Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Malamud Award and Guggenheim Fellowship.

Relationships, Diaz has had problems with women and fidelity. According to the New Yorker, he said this after Ms. Clemmons alleged that Diaz sexually harassed her. He also added that all this was caused by an incidence of rape he suffered as a child. Ms. Clemmons claimed that she is just but one of the victims that Mr. Diaz cornered and tried to forcibly kiss.

Diaz grew up at a hostile hence his activism efforts. After he was born, Diaz lived for about 6 years in Santo Domingo. Diaz catches the strain felt by numerous migrants. It is hard to shape one's personality between two nations, two societies. This strain is available in Oscar. He doesn't show the characteristics he has been told are those of the original Dominican man. He is a virgin who wouldn't like to be one, an unquenchable peruser inundated in the realms of J. R. R. Tolkien and Oscar Wilde. He needs to fit in, regardless of whether with the understudies at his school or with the individuals he meets when he visits the Dominican Republic (Frydman, Jason, 2009). In one of Oscar's most upsetting minutes.

Beli is scarred, genuinely and physically. She is in the end found by her auntie, known as La Inca, who devotes her life to aiding Beli to take advantage of her post-injury life. Be that as it may, Beli's battles don't end there. As an adolescent, she goes gaga for and takes part in an extramarital entanglement with a wedded man, whose spouse is Trujillo's sister. Accordingly, she is hijacked and tormented, "beat...like she was a slave. Like she was a pooch." It is in this character we see the shocking inheritance of the Trujillo. While the tale of this family is anecdotal, the impacts of Trujillo's tyranny are most certainly not. "I needed to comprehend and catch these wonders, the political, social, social marvels that were Trujillo.

Work Cited

Obejas, Achy. "A conversation with Junot Diaz." Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 42.1 (2009): 42-47.

Neilson, Jim. "The Geek vs. the Goat: Pop cultural Politics in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." A Contracorriente: Una Revista de Estudios latinoamericanos 11.2 (2014): 256-277.

Frydman, Jason. "Violence, Masculinity, and Upward Mobility in the Dominican Diaspora: Junot Diaz, the Media, and Drown." Hispanic-American Writers 8 (2009): 133.