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

Biography

Russell Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts on March 28, 1940 and grew up "in relative poverty". His father, Earl, deserted the family when Banks was aged 12. While he was awarded a scholarship to attend Colgate University, he dropped out six weeks into university and travelled south instead, with the "intention of joining Fidel Castro's insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida". He married a sales clerk and they had a daughter.

According to an interview with The Independent, he started to write when he was living in Miami in the late 1950s, though an interview with The Paris Review dates this to Banks's subsequent spell living in Boston. He moved back to New England in 1964 and then to North Carolina, where he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, funded by the family of his second wife, Mary Gunst. In Chapel Hill, Banks was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and in civil-rights protests. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Banks divorced Mary Gunst in 1977 after 14 years of marriage. He was subsequently married to Kathy Walton, an editor at Harper & Row, for five years.

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


After living in Jamaica and writing The Book of Jamaica, I accepted that I was obliged, for example, to have African American friends. I was obliged to address deliberately the overlapping social and racial contexts of my life. I'm a white man in a white-dominated, racialized society; therefore, if I want to I can live my whole life in a racial fantasy. Most white Americans do just that. Because we can. In a color-defined society we are invited to think that white is not a color. We are invited to fantasize and we act accordingly.

Banks now lives in Keene, upstate New York, though spends the winters in Miami. He was a New York State Author for 2004-2006. He is also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University. He is married to the poet Chase Twichell, his fourth wife. Banks has four daughters from his previous marriages.

Banks is an American novelist 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, the often reflect “moral themes and personal relationships”.

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