Russell Banks

Author

• Born: March 28, 1940
• Place of Birth: Newton, Massachusetts
• Died: January 7, 2023
• Place of Death: Saratoga Springs, New York

AMERICAN NOVELIST AND POET

Biography

Russell Earl Banks was the son of working-class parents. His father, Earl Banks, was a plumber who shuffled his family around eastern New England in a futile quest for the American Dream. After Earl ran off to Florida with a girlfriend in 1952, Florence Taylor Banks divorced him and worked as a bookkeeper to support her young family. Russell entered high school as the oldest male in a household of marginal means.

Banks won a full scholarship to Colgate University in 1958, but he could not adjust to the elitist academic environment and dropped out during his first semester. In January, 1959, he left for Cuba, intending to join Fidel Castro’s revolution, but he never made it past Florida. Drifting from Miami to St. Petersburg, he worked first in a hotel and then in a department store, where he met his first wife, Darlene Bennett. Banks became disillusioned by Florida life, and he and Bennett eventually moved to Boston, where their daughter, Leona Banks, was born in May, 1960. Banks found work in a bookstore and embarked upon his writing career, however fitfully.

Banks’s marriage broke up later in 1960, and Bennett returned to Florida with Leona. The next summer Banks was again off to Florida but not to join his family. Instead, he lived in a trailer in the Florida Keys, pumped gas, and continued to write. After a lengthy road trip through the Southwest and Mexico and visiting his mother at her new home in San Diego, he returned to New England in 1962 and followed his father into pipe fitting in Concord, New Hampshire. In October he married Mary Gunst, a woman he knew from his Boston days. He did not stop writing; in 1963 he attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. There he met Nelson Algren, who became his mentor.

In 1964, after Gunst gave birth in July to a daughter, Caerthan, Banks headed south again, this time to attend the University of North Carolina on a "scholarship" from his wife’s family. His sojourn in Chapel Hill, where he earned his B.A. in 1967, was crucially formative: He was introduced to the ferment of radical politics and to the reality of the United States’ racial landscape. He also completed his second unpublished novel during this time and cofounded (with poet William Matthews) Lillabulero Press, which published poetry and fiction by Banks and others. Another daughter, Maia, was born in 1968, and Banks’s family moved back to New Hampshire.

Banks began to teach college writing, and his continued association with the Lillabulero Press led to the 1969 publication of his first solo book of poems, Waiting to Freeze. His fourth daughter, Danis, was born in 1970, and Banks’s short stories began to appear regularly. In 1974 he won the O. Henry Award for short fiction and published another volume of poetry, Snow. The next year saw the publication of his first novel, the goofy Family Life, as well as his first short-story collection, Searching for Survivors.

In 1976–1977, a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Banks to spend sixteen months in Jamaica, where he worked full time on his writing and gathered material later used in his fiction. The fellowship led to the publication of Hamilton Stark and The New World in 1978 and The Book of Jamaica in 1980, but it also precipitated the 1977 breakup of Banks’s marriage to Gunst. In 1979, Earl Banks died, freeing Russell to confront the ghosts of his childhood directly in his fiction. (Earl is the model for the elusive Hamilton Stark as well as for several other characters appearing in Banks’s fiction.) Meanwhile, Banks took up a new teaching post at New England College.

In 1982, Banks married for the third time, to colleague and book editor Kathy Walton, and moved with her to Brooklyn. Once in New York, Banks shuttled between teaching duties at Columbia University and Princeton University, a track which led eventually to his appointment as Clark University Professor at Princeton. The final novel of Banks’s early period, the experimental and quirky The Relation of My Imprisonment, appeared in 1983. Like its predecessors, its seventeenth century form (that of the deviant Puritan’s confession) called attention to itself as written document and literary artifice, as if Banks were still writing academic exercises.

The novel that brought Banks to the attention of a much wider audience of critics and readers, 1985's award-winning Continental Drift, reveals him to be in full control of his materials and his powers. The novel relates the parallel stories of Bob DuBois, a New Hampshire plumber who moves his family south to pursue his fortune, and Vanise Dorsonville, a poor Haitian who endures rape and imprisonment while emigrating to the United States. The stories unite explosively for the ending as the two character's lives intertwine. The collection Success Stories expands Continental Drift’s intersection of gender and class issues, using both fable and quasi-autobiographical narrative.

In 1988 Banks divorced Walton and married his Princeton colleague poet Chase Twichell, as if to punctuate his own extraordinary success story. In 1989 the disturbing novel Affliction appeared, with its chilling portrayal of the intergenerational transmission of alcoholism and male violence. Then came The Sweet Hereafter in 1991, a grim examination of how a small town deals with the loss of its children. Both novels were made into successful and award-winning small-budget movies, with James Coburn winning an Academy Award for best supporting actor in the adaptation of Affliction. It is a measure of the depressing narratives of those two works that in comparison his next novel, Rule of the Bone (1995), with its stoned youth, sexual abuse, and violence, seems an almost lighthearted remake of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Banks closed out the decade with the massive Cloudsplitter, a meticulously researched historical novel that compels the reader to take a fresh look at the abolitionist rebel John Brown. In the year of its publication, 1998, he retired from his Princeton professorship to devote himself to writing, securely positioned as a leading American novelist and literary intellectual.

Banks's short story collection The Angel on the Roof appeared in 2000. His next novel was The Darling, published in 2004. Another work of historical fiction, it focuses on the life a female left-wing radical involved with the revolutionary Weathermen organization in the 1970s who flees to Africa and gets caught up in the Liberian civil war. The Reserve (2008) and Lost Memory of Skin (2011) followed, along with the short story collection A Permanent Member of the Family (2013). His travel memoir Voyager was released in 2016.

Banks earned numerous awards and honors throughout his decades as a professional writer, and many of his works received strong critical acclaim. He was awarded the John Dos Passos Prize in 1985, was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, and won the Common Wealth Award for Literature in 2011. He was a finalist multiple times for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2012 with Lost Memory of Skin. The New York State Writers Hall of Fame inducted Banks in 2014.

On Sunday, January 7, 2023, at the age of 82, Banks passed away from cancer at his home in Saratoga Springs, New York. In March 2024, Banks’ collection of short stories, American Spirits, was published posthumously by Penguin Random House.

Bibliography

Banks, Russell. "Russell Banks: By the Book." International New York Times. New York Times, 2 Jan. 2014. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

Chapman, Jeff, and Pamela S. Dean. Contemporary Authors 52 (1996). Print.

Charles, Katie. "The Best Novels You’ve Never Read." New York, June 4, 2007. Print.

Haley, Vanessa. "Russell Banks’s Use of 'The Frog King' in ‘Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story.'" Notes on Contemporary Literature 27 (1997): 7-10. Print.

Hutchison, Anthony. "Representative Man: John Brown and the Politics of Redemption in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter." Journal of American Studies 41, no. 1 (April, 2007): 67-82. Print.

McPherson, James. "Russell Banks’s Fictional Portrait of John Brown." Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other). Ed. Mark C. Carnes. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Print.

Meanor, Patrick, ed. American Short Story Writers Since World War II. Vol. 130 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1993. Print.

Moses, Cathy. Dissenting Fictions: Identity and Resistance in the Contemporary American Novel. New York: Garland, 2000. Print.

Niemi, Robert. Russell Banks. New York: Twayne, 1997. Print.

Niemi, Robert. "Russell Banks." American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supplement V—Russell Banks to Charles Wright. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Scribner’s, 2000. Print.

"Russell Banks." Steven Barclay Agency. Steven Barclay Agency, 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

Somerson, Wendy. "Becoming Rasta: Recentering White Masculinity in the Era of Transnationalism." Comparatist 23 (1999): 128-140. Print.

Trucks, Rob. The Pleasure of Influence: Conversations with American Male Fiction Writers. West Lafayette, Ind.: NotaBell Books, 2002. Print.