Russell Banks

Russell Earl Banks (March 28, 1940 – January 8, 2023) was an American writer of fiction and poetry. His novels are known for "detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters". He drew from his own childhood in the working class, but also from the larger world, such as his years in Jamaica. His novels often reflect "moral themes and personal relationships". He was the son of Florence (née Taylor), a homemaker, and Earl Banks, a plumber, and was raised in Barnstead, New Hampshire.

Awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, Banks dropped out six weeks into university and traveled south instead, with the "intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida". In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and protest during the Civil Rights Movement. In 1989, he married poet Chase Twichell.

He taught creative writing at Princeton University.

Honors Banks's works received high recognition through his career. He was the 1985 recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for fiction. His novels Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter were finalists for the 1986 and 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, respectively.

Banks was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.

He was a New York State Author for 2004–2006.

Death Banks died from cancer at his home in Saratoga Springs, New York, on Sunday, January 8, 2023, at the age of 82.

Works and themes His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He wrote fiction, and, later, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997 (see The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction). Many of Banks's works reflect his working-class upbringing. His stories often show people facing tragedy and downturns in everyday life, expressing sadness and self-doubt, but also showing resilience and strength in the face of their difficulties. Banks also wrote short stories, some of which appear in the collection The Angel on the Roof, as well as poetry.

Banks also lived in Jamaica. Interviewed in 1998 for The Paris Review, he stated that:

1=After living in Jamaica and writing The Book of Jamaica, I accepted that I was obliged, for example, to have African-American friends. I was obliged to address, deliberately, the overlapping social and racial contexts of my life. I'm a white man in a white-dominated, racialized society, therefore, if I want to I can live my whole life in a racial fantasy. Most white Americans do just that. Because we can. In a color-defined society we are invited to think that white is not a color. We are invited to fantasize, and we act accordingly.

In 2023, it was confirmed that Paul Schrader would write and direct Oh, Canada, an adaptation of Banks's novel, Foregone, starring Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi.

Reception According to Robert Faggen in The Paris Review, Banks's debut novel, Family Life, "was not a critical success". His next volume, a collection of short stories called Searching for Survivors, won Banks an O. Henry Award. A second collection of short stories, The New World, published in 1978, "received acclaim for its blending of historical and semi-autobiographical material".

He was briefly mentioned in philosopher Richard Rorty's 1996 future history essay "Fraternity Reigns" in The New York Times Magazine. Rorty referred to him as having written a 2021 novel, Trampling the Vineyards, describing it as "samizdat" because of the political repression envisioned in the philosopher's speculative essay.

In 2011, The Guardians Tom Cox selected Cloudsplitter as one of his "overlooked classics of American literature".

Awards and honors

1975 O. Henry Award 1985 Dos Passos Prize 1996 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2011 Commonwealth Award for Literature 2012 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, shortlist, Lost Memory of Skin American Book Award Guggenheim Fellowship

Works Novels Family Life (1975) Hamilton Stark (1978) The Book of Jamaica (1980) The Relation of My Imprisonment (1983) Continental Drift (1985) Affliction (1989) The Sweet Hereafter (1991) Rule of the Bone (1995) Cloudsplitter (1998) The Darling (2004) The Reserve (2008) Lost Memory of Skin (2011) Foregone (2021) The Magic Kingdom (2022)

Story collections Searching for Survivors (1975) The New World (1978) Trailerpark (1981) Success Stories (1986) The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (2000) A Permanent Member of the Family (2013) American Spirits (2024)

Poetry Waiting to Freeze (1969) Snow (1974)

Nonfiction Invisible Stranger (1998) Dreaming Up America (2008) Voyager (2016)