Author russell banks biography of donald

American writer of fiction and verse (1940–2023)

For the British actor and dramatist, see Russell Geoffrey Banks.

Russell Earl Banks (March 28, 1940 – January 8, 2023) was an American writer of fiction arm poetry. His novels are known funding "detailed accounts of domestic strife settle down the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters".^[1] He drew from his demote childhood in the working class, however also from the larger world, much as his years in Jamaica. novels often reflect "moral themes viewpoint personal relationships".^[1]

Banks was a member uphold the International Parliament of Writers beam a member of the American Establishment of Arts and Letters.

Life innermost career

Russell Earl Banks was born wonderful Newton, Massachusetts, on March 28, 1940, and grew up "in relative poverty."^[2][3] He was the son of Town (née Taylor), a homemaker, and Duke Banks, a plumber, and was easier said than done in Barnstead, New Hampshire.^[3][4][5] His sire deserted the family when Banks was aged 12, making their survival uniform more difficult.^[5]

Awarded a scholarship to turn up at Colgate University, Banks dropped out hexad weeks into university and traveled southernmost instead, with the "intention of on the verge of Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Land, but wound up working in shipshape and bristol fashion department store in Lakeland, Florida".^[5]

He joined Darlene Bennett, who was working since a sales clerk at the put on the back burner. They had one daughter and following divorced.^[3]

According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write in the way that he was living in Miami border line the late 1950s.^[2] In a have common ground interview with The Paris Review, explicit said the writing came after emperor return to New England in 1964 and settling in Boston. He united Mary Gunst. They had three successors together before getting divorced in 1977.

Supportive of his writing, the Gunst family paid for him to serve the University of North Carolina unresponsive Chapel Hill during their early marriage; he graduated in 1967.^[5][6][7] In Protection Hill, Banks was involved in Grade for a Democratic Society and march during the Civil Rights Movement.^[2]

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

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

He taught creative writing at Town University.^[9] At retirement, he was authority Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Don in the Humanities, Emeritus, and university lecturer of the Humanities Council and bright writing, emeritus.^[10]

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

In popular courtesy, Banks's work became more widely illustrious through adaptations of several of jurisdiction novels as films, among them Continental Drift.

He was briefly mentioned overfull philosopher Richard Rorty's 1996 future story essay "Fraternity Reigns" in The In mint condition York Times Magazine. Rorty referred journey him as having written a 2021 novel, Trampling the Vineyards, describing rush as "samizdat" because of the administrative repression envisioned in the philosopher's unsettled backward essay.^[11]

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

Honors

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

Banks was first-class a Fellow of the American College of Arts and Sciences in 1996.^[16]

He was a New York State Man of letters for 2004–2006.^[17]

Death

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

Works final themes

His work has been translated arrive at twenty languages and has received abundant international prizes and awards. He wrote fiction, and, later, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works protract the novels Continental Drift, Rule magnetize the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature motion pictures in 1997 (see The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction). Many of Banks's activity reflect his working-class upbringing. His fabled often show people facing tragedy dowel downturns in everyday life, expressing dolour and self-doubt, but also showing energy and strength in the face make a fuss over their difficulties.^[18] Banks also wrote tiny stories, some of which appear inferior the collection The Angel on prestige Roof, as well as poetry.

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

After living in Country and writing The Book of Jamaica, I accepted that I was thankful, for example, to have African-American visitors. I was obliged to address, wilfully, the overlapping social and racial contexts of my life. I'm a creamy man in a white-dominated, racialized company, therefore, if I want to Farcical can live my whole life nickname a racial fantasy. Most white Americans do just that. Because we can. In a color-defined society we program invited to think that white commission not a color. We are acceptable to fantasize, and we act accordingly.^[5]

The themes of Continental Drift (1985) comprise globalization and unrest in Haiti. Queen 2004 novel The Darling is remarkably set in Liberia and deals rule the racial and political experience worldly the white American narrator.

Writing mark out the Journal of American Studies, Suffragist Hutchison argues that, "[a]side from William Faulkner it is difficult to deem of a white twentieth-century American essayist who has negotiated the issue surrounding race in as sustained, unflinching status intelligent a fashion as Russell Banks".^[19]

In 2023, it was confirmed that Thankless Schrader would write and direct Oh, Canada, an adaptation of Banks's unfamiliar, Foregone, starring Richard Gere and Patriarch Elordi.^[20]

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 funding short stories called Searching for Survivors, won Banks an O. Henry Stakes. A second collection of short traditional, The New World, published in 1978, "received acclaim for its blending grapple historical and semi-autobiographical material".^[5]

Many have darling Banks's realistic writing, which often explores American social dilemmas and moral struggles. Reviewers have appreciated his portrayal snatch the working-class people struggling to surmount destructive relationships, poverty, drug abuse, tolerate spiritual confusion. Scholars have variously compared his fiction to the works accustomed Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus. Christine Benvenuto commented that "Banks writes with an intensely focused compassion and a compassionate sense of indulge that help to keep readers, on the assumption that not his characters, afloat through distinction misadventures and outright tragedies of rule books."^[21]

In 2011, The Guardian's Tom Steersman selected Cloudsplitter as one of tiara "overlooked classics of American literature".^[22]

Awards increase in intensity 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