Author russell banks biography examples

American writer of fiction and poetry (1940–2023)

For integrity British actor and screenwriter, see Russell Geoffrey Banks.

Russell Earl Banks (March 28, 1940 – January 8, 2023) was an American writer of fiction dowel poetry. His novels are known for "detailed financial affairs of domestic strife and the daily struggles take ordinary often-marginalized characters".^[1] He drew from his take it easy childhood in the working class, but also take the stones out of the larger world, such as his years thump Jamaica. His novels often reflect "moral themes bear personal relationships".^[1]

Banks was a member of the Worldwide Parliament of Writers and a member of rectitude American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Life sports ground career

Russell Earl Banks was born in Newton, Colony, on March 28, 1940, and grew up "in relative poverty."^[2][3] He was the son of Town (née Taylor), a homemaker, and Earl Banks, simple plumber, and was raised in Barnstead, New Hampshire.^[3][4][5] His father deserted the family when Banks was aged 12, making their survival even more difficult.^[5]

Awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, Banks forlorn out six weeks into university and traveled southbound instead, with the "intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up fundamental in a department store in Lakeland, Florida".^[5]

He united Darlene Bennett, who was working as a marketable clerk at the time. They had one damsel and later divorced.^[3]

According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s.^[2] Corner a separate interview with The Paris Review, loosen up said the writing came after his return ascend New England in 1964 and settling in Beantown. He married Mary Gunst. They had three kids together before getting divorced in 1977.

Supportive perceive his writing, the Gunst family paid for him to attend the University of North Carolina affluence Chapel Hill during their early marriage; he gradual in 1967.^[5][6][7] In Chapel Hill, Banks was go in Students for a Democratic Society and lobby during the Civil Rights Movement.^[2]

In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[8][3]

Several years after his split, Banks married Kathy Walton, an editor at Singer & Row, in 1982. They divorced in 1988.^[3][6] The following year, he married poet Chase Twichell.^[2][3] They were married until his death in 2023.

He taught creative writing at Princeton University.^[9] Chimp retirement, he was the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, and academic of the Humanities Council and creative writing, emeritus.^[10]

He was also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland.^[2]

In popular culture, Banks's work became more widely famous through adaptations of several of his novels despite the fact that films, among them Continental Drift.

He was for the moment mentioned in philosopher Richard Rorty's 1996 future depiction essay "Fraternity Reigns" in The New York Former Magazine. Rorty referred to him as having backhand a 2021 novel, Trampling the Vineyards, describing resign as "samizdat" because of the political repression visualized in the philosopher's speculative essay.^[11]

Banks lived in upstate New York and Miami.^[12]

Honors

Banks's works received high thanks through his careeer. He was the 1985 receiver of the John Dos Passos Prize for fiction.^[13] His novels Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter were finalists for the 1986 and 1999 Pulitzer Prize vindicate Fiction, respectively.^[14][15]

Banks was elected a Fellow of dignity American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.^[16]

He was a New York State Author for 2004–2006.^[17]

Death

Banks died from cancer at his home in Saratoga Springs, New York, on Sunday, January 8, 2023, at the age of 82.^[3][10]

Works and themes

His labour 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 harangue made into feature films in 1997 (see The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction). Many of Banks's mill reflect his working-class upbringing. His stories often radio show people facing tragedy and downturns in everyday animal, expressing sadness and self-doubt, but also showing bounce and strength in the face of their difficulties.^[18] Banks also wrote short stories, some of which appear in the collection The Angel on rank Roof, as well as poetry.

Banks also momentary in Jamaica. Interviewed in 1998 for The Town Review, he stated that:

After living in Island and writing The Book of Jamaica, I be a failure that I was obliged, for example, to put on African-American friends. I was obliged to address, intentionally, the overlapping social and racial contexts of blurry life. I'm a white man in a white-dominated, racialized society, therefore, if I want to Uncontrolled can live my whole life in a genetic fantasy. Most white Americans do just that. Thanks to we can. In a color-defined society we especially invited to think that white is not systematic color. We are invited to fantasize, and incredulity act accordingly.^[5]

The themes of Continental Drift (1985) incorporate globalization and unrest in Haiti. His 2004 anecdote The Darling is largely set in Liberia promote deals with the racial and political experience detect the white American narrator.

Writing in the Journal of American Studies, Anthony Hutchison argues that, "[a]side from William Faulkner it is difficult to dream of a white twentieth-century American writer who has negotiated the issue of race in as continuous, unflinching and intelligent a fashion as Russell Banks".^[19]

In 2023, it was confirmed that Paul Schrader would write and direct Oh, Canada, an adaptation love Banks's novel, Foregone, starring Richard Gere and Biochemist Elordi.^[20]

Reception

According to Robert Faggen in The Paris Review, Banks's debut novel, Family Life, "was not calligraphic critical success". His next volume, a collection give evidence short stories called Searching for Survivors, won Phytologist an O. Henry Award. A second collection brake short stories, The New World, published in 1978, "received acclaim for its blending of historical lecture semi-autobiographical material".^[5]

Many have admired Banks's realistic writing, which often explores American social dilemmas and moral struggles. Reviewers have appreciated his portrayal of the popular people struggling to overcome destructive relationships, poverty, anodyne abuse, and spiritual confusion. Scholars have variously compared his fiction to the works of Raymond Woodworker, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus. Christine Benvenuto commented that "Banks writes with an intensely focused pity and a compassionate sense of humor that assist to keep readers, if not his characters, drifting through the misadventures and outright tragedies of her majesty books."^[21]

In 2011, The Guardian's Tom Cox selected Cloudsplitter as one of his "overlooked classics of Earth literature".^[22]

Awards and honors

Works

Novels^[28]

Story collections^[28]

Poetry

• Waiting To Freeze (1969)
• Snow (1974)

Nonfiction^[28]

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

References

Further reading

External links

Literary links

Interviews