Russell Banks

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Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940) is an American writer of fiction and poetry.

As a novelist, Banks is best known for his "detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of ordinary often-marginalized characters".

His stories usually revolve around his own childhood experiences, and often reflect "moral themes and personal relationships".Banks is a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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Life and career

Banks were established in Newton, Massachusetts, on March 28, 1940, and the number grew "in relative poverty." He is the son of Florence (née Taylor), a homemaker, and Earl Banks, a plumber, and was born in Barnstead, New Hampshire. When Banks was 12, his father abandoned the family. Although he was given a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks early and walked south instead, with the "intention of joining Fidel Castro's guerrilla army in Cuba," but instead he ended up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida." He married a sales clerk and they had a child.

He began writing in Miami in the late 1950s, according to a Banks interview, but The Paris Review dates this to Banks' subsequent stay in Boston. He returned to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which was sponsored by his second wife, Mary Gunst. Banks was active in the formation of a Students for a Democratic Society and a resistance campaign in Chapel Hill during the Civil Rights Movement. In 1976, he was given a Guggenheim Fellowship. After 14 years of marriage, Mary Gunst divorced her in 1977. He was married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row for five years.

Now lives in Keene, upstate New York, wintering in Miami. For 2004–2006, he was a New York State Author. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. At Princeton University, he has taught creative writing. Chase Twichell, his fourth wife, is his husband. There are four children from his previous marriages at the bank.

The John Dos Passos Prize for fiction was awarded to him in 1985 by the bank. Both continental Drift and Cloudsplitter were finalists for the 1986 and 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1996, Banks was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Banks were briefly mentioned in philosopher Richard Rorty's 1996 future history essay "Fraternity Reigns" in The New York Times as having written the fictional book Trampling the Vineyards, which was described as "samizdat" in 2021.

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Awards and honors

• 1985 John Dos Passos Prize
• 1996 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2004-2006 New York State Author
• 2012 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, shortlist, Lost Memory of Skin