(New York) Russell Banks, award-winning fiction writer for his novels like Affliction and The Sweet Hereafterdied at the age of 82.
Mr Banks, also a professor emeritus at Princeton University, died in upstate New York on Saturday while undergoing treatment for cancer, his editor, Dan Halpern, said. at the Associated Press.
Born in Newton and raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Russell Banks was a self-proclaimed heir to 19th-century writers.e century such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and aspired to capture the spirit of the country. The son of a plumber, he often wrote about working-class families and those who had died trying to get by.
Mr. Banks lived part of the year in Florida and for a time had a home in Jamaica, but he was essentially a northerner. Snow fell often in his fiction, whether on the upstate New York community torn apart by a bus crash in The Sweet Hereafter or the desperate, divorced New Hampshire policeman defeated by his paranoid fantasies in Affliction.
His stories were often set in the rural, wintery communities of his native Northeast, where the novelist recounted everyone’s dreams and failures, ranging from the hardships of modern blue-collar workers to the story of radical abolitionist John Brown in Cloudsplitter.
It was in 1985 that Russells Banks experienced a real breakthrough with Continental Drift. It tells the story of Bob Dubois, an oil burner repairman, who flees his native New Hampshire and goes into business with his wealthy brother in Florida, only to learn that he was as poor as him.