George Michael Cuomo


George Michael Cuomo was an American author of eight novels, as well as short stories, poetry, and a nonfiction book.

Life

He attended Stuyvesant High School and earned a B.A. from Tufts University in 1952 in addition to an M.A. from Indiana University in 1955. Furthermore, Cuomo has taught at the University of Arizona, the University of California, University of Victoria in British Columbia, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
His work appeared in Antioch Review, Minnesota Review, The Nation, Saturday Review, Tamarack Review.
Cuomo's first novel, Jack be Nimble, was published in 1963. The novel's eponymous narrator evokes the anti-hero of All the King's Men, transplanted to the topsy-turvy world of collegiate football. His subsequent novels, which include Among Thieves, Family Honor, and Trial By Water, engage troubling issues of race, class, and social justice. Cuomo's deeply fallible heroes tend to be people that genteel society would prefer to forget: a small-time criminal caught up in a brutal prison riot, a racial minority ensnared in a domestic terrorist plot.
His name has been mentioned more than once in lists of unfairly neglected authors, for example by Richard Yates in Ploughshares.
His papers are held at University of Victoria.

Awards

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