Sandra Cisneros
1 book analyzed
Biography
Sandra Cisneros was born in 1954 in Chicago, the only daughter among seven children in a Mexican-American family. The family moved frequently between Chicago and Mexico City, never quite belonging to either place. She attended Loyola University and then the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she felt profoundly out of place among students with different class and cultural backgrounds. That outsiderness — the realization that her experience was not represented in literature — became the seed of The House on Mango Street. She wrote the book in her mid-twenties, reaching back to her Chicago childhood to find a form — the linked vignette, the prose-poem — adequate to experiences that conventional novel structure could not hold. It was published by a small press in 1984 and became one of the most widely taught books in American schools.