Just mention Rutgers to literary sensation Junot Díaz RC’92, and you’ll jump-start a joyful riff about how the place changed his life. That’s not surprising, given the role Rutgers plays in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a raucous novel that’s earning Díaz raves everywhere from Time (“astoundingly great”) to National Public Radio (“one of the best first novels of recent decades”). The title character, Oscar, a dorky, fat Dominican kid from Paterson, ends up attending Rutgers, as does his sister Lola and her off-and-on boyfriend Yunior. Wao is crammed with Rutgers–New Brunswick locales, from Douglass to Demarest. To hear Díaz tell it, he’s not through with the place. “I always knew I was going to write about Rutgers, and I’ll probably write a few more times about it,” says Díaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic and is now a tenured professor at MIT. “I haven't begun to scratch the surface.”

“The gulfs were interstellar.” Díaz grew up in London Terrace, a Parlin, New Jersey, neighborhood reeking with the stench from Global Landfill. “I had never met anyone like myself in my neighborhood,” says Díaz. “I was one of the only readers.” At Cedar Ridge High School, Díaz ended up in honors classes (“whiter than the Swiss volleyball team”), but he was an outsider. “Not only was I with predominantly white kids, but predominantly wealthy white kids,” he notes. “The gulfs were interstellar.”

Rutgers on his radar screen. The only person he knew who attended college was a Douglass student, a basketball player; when Díaz was 9 or 10 years old, she would “talk to us knuckleheads,” as Díaz puts it, and tell them “if you guys had half a brain you’d try to get into this school rather than acting like fools.” Díaz was wowed. “I will never forget that she used to wear a Rutgers T-shirt,” he says. “That thing was iconic—it glowed. In some ways, the direct line between me and Rutgers began with her.”

The big change. Everything changed for Díaz when he got to Rutgers. He recalls stepping off the bus at Douglass to go to the co-op bookstore, and what he found there—the shelves of books, and Douglass women talking about books and ideas and politics, and the whole wild maelstrom of intellectual life and activism at a big university. “I felt like I had been orphaned from my people, and I had finally found where I belonged,” he says. “It was just extraordinary. My life changed—just changed. It was just beautiful... When I got to Rutgers, it was the first time I felt safe since I left the Dominican Republic. A moment like that is hard to forget.” Or, as he told the New York Times, “Rutgers, honestly, it was like a wonderland for me, like going from the black and white of Kansas to the Technicolor of Oz. I had never been around the density of so many smart, beautiful people.”

Rutgers as literary material. Even before The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Díaz tackled Rutgers in his fiction. His stylish 1996 short story collection, Drown, included Rutgers and New Brunswick sites, with mentions of 1980s-era clubs (“We hit the Melody and the Roxy, stare at the college girls”). But in the novel, the university pretty much gets star billing, with plenty of Rutgers-specific details. “There’s so much amazing stuff that happens between young people when they’re at college,” he says. “When you’ve got 40,000 students, man, and you’ve got a women’s college. Oh my god! For my friends, all the basic grammar of our romantic lives was learned at Rutgers. It’s where you do all your serious experimentations.”

“It felt like the world was given a university.” Díaz teaches at MIT, and he attended graduate school at Cornell University, but even after those experiences, he is still wowed by his time at Rutgers. “It was only when I went to Cornell grad school that I realized how extraordinary Rutgers was,” says Díaz, “in the sense that I was there with kids who were working, kids who weren’t working, feminists, kids who were anti-intellectual, kids with dreams of going on to an Ivy League school, kids who wanted to start businesses, international students. The world felt very close while you were at Rutgers. We were getting this amazing education, we were in this amazing space, but the world was never far.” And the diversity wasn’t just a catchphrase—it was very, very real. “It felt like the world was given a university, not like the rich and the special and the privileged were given a university,” he says. “It felt like the world that I knew and that I recognized, a world where people worked hard and they dreamed and nobody gave them anything—that world was given a university, and it was really beautiful.”

New Jersey, a state worth discussing. Though much of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao takes place at Rutgers and in the Dominican Republic, a variety of New Jersey spots, from the Woodbridge Center mall to Wildwood, also get the Díaz treatment. “The same way I wanted to document the lives of my friends that nobody seemed to care about, that no one seemed to notice,” he says, “I also wanted to document a state which is the place where I learned to be human, to be an adult. That landscape helped shape my perceptions, my opinions, my vision of the world. It launched me into the world. On top of that, you feel like no one’s doing it, and you think, well, no competition.” No competition? What about Philip Roth? What about Díaz’s contemporary, Tom Perrotta? “It’s not that it’s not being done,” Díaz notes, “or hasn’t been done, it’s just that there’s so much more work to do. It’s a state worth discussing.”