George Michael Cuomo

George Michael Cuomo (b. 1929, New York City) is the author of eight novels, as well as short stories, poetry, and a nonfiction book.

Cuomo attended Stuyvesant High School. He earned a B.A. from Tufts University in 1952 and an M.A. from Indiana University in 1955. He has taught at the University of Arizona, theUniversity of California, and the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

Cuomo's first novel, "Jack be Nimble", was published in 1963. The novel's eponymous narrator evokes (no doubt intentionally) 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 colored boy ensnared in a domestic terrorist plot.

It is perhaps strange that such an accomplished writer should be so little known; perhaps Cuomo's subjects have been too disturbing for his books to really catch on. In any case, his name has been mentioned more than once in lists of unfairly neglected authors, for example by Richard Yates in "Ploughshares".