In Memoriam—Edgardo Vega Yunqué, 1936-2008

by David Unger -- Críticas, 9/15/2008 8:57:00 AM

Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo (Ed) Vega Yunqué, the author of 14 novels (eight published) and the founder of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center in New York’s Lower East Side, died on August 25 in Brooklyn’s Lutheran Hospital. He was 72. Vega Yunqué’s agent, Tom Colchie, informed the press of the author’s death early this month. The cause of death was not announced.

The stepfather of singer Suzanne Vega, the Puerto Rican–born author championed the work of many up-and-coming Latino writers. His highly-acclaimed novel, No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home (FSG, 2003), a multi-generational novel about race, jazz, and the effects of war on an American family, garnered good reviews and elevated Vega among contemporary U.S. authors, winning him the2004 PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence).

Two novels followed shortly after: The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle (Overlook, 2004) and Blood Fugues (Rayo, 2005), a novel that traces the lives of an Irish and Puerto Rican family united by marriage. The upcoming publication of his most recent novel, Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak, by Overlook Press was unexpectedly cancelled this past July.

Vega moved to New York from his native island in 1949 when his father, a Baptist minister, secured a Spanish-speaking ministry in the South Bronx. After graduating from high school, he joined the Air Force, where, during his free time, he steeped himself in the work of such classic American authors as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and many others.

Vega’s writing was irreverent, political (he was a Puerto Rican Independista), and often combative, as was the author. He sparred with novelist Walter Mosley over the term “writers of color,” which he found abhorrent; he called Stephen King “self-serving and cloying” for suggesting that there shouldn’t be a distinction between popular and literary novels. However, poet Martin Espada (The Republic of Poetry, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002, Norton) told Críticas “Ed was one helluva [sic] writer. He had a particular gift for satire…. He was willing to lampoon his own community, and that’s rare….”