Edgardo Vega Yunqué

In 1949 he came to the U.S. to join his parents when his father secured a position as the head of a Spanish-speaking congregation in the South Bronx. The congregation had bought a Lutheran mini-cathedral with an adjoining three story house. In his exploration of the sub-basement of the church Edgardo found the remnants of a Nazi Bund with Lugers, swastikas, helmets, bayonets, and literature. He asked his father what these things were. Once the Nazi atrocities were explained he set out to read Holocaust literature, which he continues doing to this day. Since the neighborhood into which he was introduced to the U.S. was mainly Irish, their concern with uniting their country and freeing it from British domination also had a profound impact on the writer’s life and his subsequent literary output.

After high school, Edgardo joined the Air Force, attending radio operator school in Biloxi, Mississippi in a segregated South. Subsequently, he was stationed on the island of Terceira in the Azores, where he learned Portuguese, and in Athens, Greece, where he learned conversational Greek.

Edgardo’s decision to become a writer was prompted by a most unusual introduction to American Literature. While on leave in 1955 he helped his sister and her friend clear out an estate in central New York, where he found a trove of "pocket books." He brought home some 300 of these books in two suitcases and over the next 20 days of his leave he began reading. Among the books, which included Mickey Spillane and other detective and science fiction novels, he had managed to bring, based solely on their sexy covers, all of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Caldwell, Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and a number of other significant 20th Century novelists. One night he began reading William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, going over the first page 30 times and almost giving up and dismissing the writer as uninteresting. On the 31st reading, however, the long, rhythmic sentences and their periodic structure kicked in and he was hooked. Faulkner and Steinbeck remain his seminal influences because they have written in the tragic and comic modes with equal fluency.

Upon his return from the Air Force he went to California where he attended Santa Monica College, played baseball with mediocre results, was permitted to practice with the football team, and met his future wife. In 1962 he returned to NYC and attended NYU, majoring in Latin American literature.

On the day he was to have his picture taken for the yearbook, JFK was assassinated. This had a profound effect on his life. He stopped going to school and instead went to work in the war on poverty as an organizer in his neighborhood of East Harlem. He was already writing short stories and, holding a number of jobs, he continued writing while raising his family. In 1977, at the age of 41, his first short story, "Wild Horses," an intentional reference to Faulkner, was published by Nuestro magazine. In 1985 his first novel The Comeback was published by Arte Público Press. In 1987 AP published Mendoza’s Dreams and in 1991 Casualty Report, a collection of short stories.

Edgardo Vega Yunqué has completed 14 novels and 3 collections of short stories. He is at work on more than a dozen other books. An oddity in the world of letters, he creates very much like a painter, working on five or six novels at a time. "Since my work is about people and my affection for them," he said recently, "I don’t lose track of who they are just like I don’t lose track of my children or other relatives and acquaintances. I have friends--and characters--who I don’t see for a long time, but as soon as we get together we pick up where we left off."