Stay up to date with notifications from TheĀ Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Russell Banks, praised author of 'Cloudsplitter,' dies at 82

Prize-winning author Russell Banks has died

Hillel Italie
Sunday 08 January 2023 11:54 EST
Obit Russell Banks
Obit Russell Banks (AP2004)

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

Russell Banks, an award-winning fiction writer who rooted such novels as ā€œAfflictionā€ and ā€œThe Sweet Hereafterā€ in the wintry, rural communities of his native Northeast and imagined the dreams and downfalls of everyone from modern blue-collar workers to the radical abolitionist John Brown, has died. He was 82.

Banks, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, died Saturday in upstate New York, his editor, Dan Halpern, told The Associated Press. Banks was being treated for cancer, Halpern said.

Born in Newton, Massachusetts, and raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Banks was a self-styled heir to such 19th century writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, aspiring to high art and a deep grasp of the countryā€™s spirit. He was a plumberā€™s son who wrote often about working class families and those who died trying to break out.

Banks lived part of the year in Florida, and for a time had a home in Jamaica, but he was essentially a man of the North, with an old Puritanā€™s sense of consequences. Snow fell often in his fiction, whether on the upstate New York community torn by a bus crash in ā€œThe Sweet Hereafterā€ or on the desperate, divorced New Hampshire policeman undone by his paranoid fantasies in ā€œAffliction.ā€

In Banksā€™ critical breakthrough ā€œContinental Drift,ā€ published in 1985, oil burner repairman Bob Dubois flees from his native New Hampshire and goes into business with his wealthy brother in Florida, only to learn his brotherā€™s life was as hollow as his own.

ā€œHis brotherā€™s strut and brag were empty from the start, and in a deep, barely conscious way, Bob knew that all along and forgave him his strut and brag simply because he knew they were empty. But he had never believed it would come to this, to nothing,ā€ Banks wrote.

ā€œCloudsplitterā€ was his most ambitious novel, a 750-page narrative on John Brown and his improbable quest to rid the country of slavery.

The story long precedes Banksā€™ lifetime, but the inspiration was literally close to home. Banks lived near Brownā€™s burial ground in North Elba, New York, and he would pass by often enough that Brown ā€œbecame a kind of ghostly presence,ā€ the author told the AP in 1998.

ā€œCloudsplitterā€ reads like a prequel to Banksā€™ contemporary works, a summoning of Hawthorne and other early influences. As remembered by son Owen Brown, John Brown was a haunted man of the Old World whose resolve to free the slaves and punish the enslavers made his face burn like a revivalist preacherā€™s.

ā€œI was a boy; I was frightened by my fatherā€™s face,ā€ Banksā€™ narrator explains. ā€œI remember father looking straight into our eyes, burning us with his gaze, as he told us to hear him now. He had determined that he would henceforth put his sins of pride and vanity behind him. And he would go out from here and wage war on slavery. The time has come, he declared, and he wished to join the time in full cry.ā€

Banks was a Pulitzer finalist for ā€œCloudsplitterā€ in 1999 and had been one 13 years earlier for ā€œContinental Drift.ā€ His other honors included the Anisfeld-Book Award for ā€œCloudsplitterā€ and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Two of his books were adapted into acclaimed film releases in the late 1990s: ā€œThe Sweet Hereafter,ā€ directed by Atom Egoyan and starring Ian Holm, and director Paul Schraderā€™s ā€œAffliction,ā€ which brought James Coburn an Academy Award for best supporting actor.

More recent works by Banks included the story collection ā€œA Permanent Member of the Familyā€ and the 2021 novel ā€œForegone,ā€ in which an American filmmaker who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War looks back on his impulsive youth ā€” a background Banks understood from the inside.

His books often told of absent and otherwise failing fathers and Banksā€™ own father, Earl Banks, was an alcoholic whom the author says beat him as a child and left him with a permanently damaged left eye.

Russell was meant for other worlds, smart enough to have the nickname ā€œTeacherā€ in high school and become the first of his family to attend college, receiving a full scholarship from Colgate University.

He was an idealist in search of ideals, among countless young people of the 1960s to adopt Jack Kerouacā€™s ā€œOn the Roadā€ as a kind of Bible. He dropped out of Colgate and drove South with dreams of joining Fidel Castroā€™s revolutionary army in Cuba, a quest which ended in St. Petersburg, Florida.

He was married twice by his early 20s (and eventually had four children), endured more than a few bar fights, wrote poetry bad enough that he later wished he had burned it, worked for a time with his father as a plumber back in New Hampshire and resumed his education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He was in his mid-30s, and nearing the end of his second marriage, when he published his first story collection, ā€œSearching for Survivors,ā€ and first novel, ā€œFamily Life.ā€

By the start of the 1990s, when he turned 50, he was an established author and had settled into a lasting marriage with his fourth wife, the poet Chase Twichell.

ā€œOver the years, I think that Iā€™ve been able to make my anger coherent to myself, and thatā€™s allowed me to become more lucid as a human being, as a writer, as ā€” I hope ā€” a husband, father, and friend,ā€ he told Ploughshares for an interview that appeared in the magazineā€™s Winter 1993-94 issue. ā€œItā€™s very hard to be a decent human being if youā€™re controlled by anger that you canā€™t understand. When you begin to acquire that understanding, you begin to become useful to other people.ā€

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in