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NEW YORK (AP) — Russell Banks is an award-winning fiction writer who rooted novels like “Affliction” and “The Sweet Hereafter” in The cold, rural communities of his native Northeast, and imagined everyone’s dreams and depravities from modern day blues – the foreman of the radical abolitionist John Brown, has died. He is 82 years old.
Banksy, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, died Saturday in upstate New York, his editor Dan Halpern told The Associated Press. Banksy is undergoing cancer treatment, Halpern said.
Joyce Carol Oates, who called Banksy on Twitter a great American author and a “beloved friend to many,” said he died peacefully at home.
Oates said: “I love Russell, and I love his extraordinary talent and magnanimity.” “‘Cloudsplitter'” (is) his masterpiece, but all his works are extraordinary.
Born and raised in Newton, Massachusetts, and raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Banksy, a self-proclaimed heir to 19th-century writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, aspired to high art and a deep national ethos. The son of a plumber, he often writes about working-class families and those who die trying to escape, plunged into a “madness” whose past can be erased, and those who, like him, escaped and survived and asked “why Me, Lord?”
Banksy lives in Florida part of the year and has a home in Jamaica for part of the year, but he’s a northerner at heart with an old Puritan sense of consequence. It snows a lot in his novels, whether it’s an upstate New York neighborhood torn apart by a bus accident in “Sweet Afterlife” or a divorced New Hampshire cop desperate for paranoid fantasies in “Affliction.”
In Banksy’s major breakthrough, “Continental Drift,” published in 1985, oil-fired repairman Bob Dubois flees his native New Hampshire to go into business with his wealthy Florida brother, but To find his brother’s life as empty as his own.
“His brother’s megalomaniacs were hollow from the start, and in a deep, almost unconscious way, Bob knew it all along and forgave his megalomaniacs simply because he knew they were Hollow. But he never believed it was going to turn out like this, and nothing came of it,” Banks wrote.
“Cracked Cloud,” his most ambitious novel yet, runs to 750 pages and tells the story of John Brown and his incredible struggle to free himself from slavery.
The story takes place long before Banksy was alive, but the inspiration was close to home. Banksy, who lives near Brown’s grave in North Elba Island, New York, often walked by Brown “becoming a ghostly presence,” the author told The Associated Press in 1998.
“Cloudsplitter” reads like a prequel to Banksy’s contemporary, an evocation of Hawthorne and other early influences. John Brown, as his son Owen Brown remembered, was a haunted man of the Old World whose determination to free slaves and punish their masters made his face sear like a revivalist preacher.
“I was a boy; I was terrified by my father’s face,” Banks’ narrator explains. “I remember my father looking us in the eyes, burning us with his gaze, telling us to listen to him now. He had made up his mind that henceforth he would put the sins of pride and vanity behind him. He would From here, declare war on slavery. The time has come, he declared, that he wished to join this weeping hour.”
Banksy was a Pulitzer finalist in 1999 with “Cloudsplitter” and 13 years ago with “Continental Drift.” His other honors include the Anisfeld-Book Award for “Cloudsplitter” and membership to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Two of his books were turned into critically acclaimed films in the late 1990s: “Sweet Afterlife,” directed by Atom Egoyan and starring Ian Holm, and James Coburn won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for director Paul Schrader’s “Misery.”
Banks’ recent credits include the story collection “A Permanent Member of the Family” and the 2021 novel “Foregone,” in which an American filmmaker who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War reflects on his impulsive youth – Banks The background learned from it.
His books often deal with his father’s absence and other failures, and Banks’ own father, Earl Banks, was an alcoholic who the author says beat him as a child, leaving him with permanent damage to his left eye.
Born for other worlds, Russell was smart enough to earn the nickname “Teacher” in high school and become the first in his family to attend college, earning a full scholarship to Colgate University.
He was an idealist chasing his ideals, and among countless young people in the 1960s, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” was regarded as the bible. He dropped out of Colgate and drove south with a dream of joining Fidel Castro’s revolutionary army in Cuba, a dream that ended in St. Petersburg, Florida.
He was married twice in his early 20s (ultimately had four children), endured more than a few bar fights, wrote poetry so badly that he later wished he had burned it, and spent time in New York with his father Worked together as a plumber for a while in Hampshire and continued his studies at UNC Chapel Hill.
In his 30s, near the end of his second marriage, he published his first collection of stories, Finding a Survivor, and his first novel, Family Life.
By the early 1990s, when he turned 50, he was an established author and married his fourth wife, the poet Chase Twichell, in a long-lasting marriage.
“Over the years, I think I’ve been able to align my anger with myself, and it’s made me more conscious as a person, as a writer, and — I hope — a husband, father, and friend,” he said. In an interview with Plowshares Magazine, Winter 1993-94. “It’s hard to be a decent human being if you’re dominated by anger that you don’t understand. When you start to gain that understanding, you start to be useful to other people.”
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