Literature: The great American novelist Russell Banks has died

The great writer Russell Banks, whose literature has focused on portraying the humblest and most marginalized in 20th-century America^And century, died on Saturday at the age of 82 from cancer.

It was another great American writer, Joyce Carol Oates, also a painter of a society sick with its violence and inequalities, who was one of the first to pay tribute to him, announcing on Twitter that her friend Russell Banks was ” died peacefully at his home in upstate New York.”

“I loved Russell and adored his immense talent and giving heart. “Cloud Slayer” (was) his masterpiece, but all of his work is outstanding, “wrote on Twitter the author, who taught writing, like Russell Banks, at Princeton University (New Jersey).

From “Affliction” (1989), a dark psychological portrait of a policeman adapted for the cinema by Paul Schrader in 1997, to “Des belles matins” (1991), a multi-voiced tale of a small town in New York State traumatized by an accident of school buses, her novels were imbued with the life of the working classes, from which she came.

Novelist, short story writer and poet, Russell Banks loved to chronicle the hardships of the working class through characters who struggle with poverty, drug addiction, class and racial issues.

“As a writer, I’m lucky. But as an American citizen I am a pessimist,” he said in an interview with the French newspaper “Le Monde” in 2016. “The middle class has become impoverished, Americans no longer believe that their children will live better than them, or even as well” , he added, showing his support for Democrat Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump.

Among her best-known books were “Cloud Slayer” (1998), a historical novel about American abolitionist John Brown, or “American Darling,” a saga-like portrait of an exiled left-middle-class American woman in Liberia. Her latest novel, “Oh, Canada”, an end-of-life story, was published in 2022.

Born in Newton, in the northeastern United States, on March 28, 1940, Russell Banks grew up in modest surroundings, and his father, a plumber, left the family home when he was 12. The father figure is often present in his books, as in “Cloud Slayer”.

After completing his studies, he sets off to discover the world, especially Jamaica, a journey from which he will draw a book (“The Book of Jamaica”) and then earn a living as a plumber. His life as an author begins when he tries his luck at a writing seminar in northeastern Vermont. Another American writer, Neslon Algren, took him under his wing. His first novel, “Family Life”, appeared in 1975.

Politically active, Russell Banks took a stand against American military intervention in Iraq and against the Patriot Act. He had also presided over the International Parliament of Writers created by Salman Rushdie and founded the organization Cities of Refuge North America, a network of asylum for exiled or threatened writers. Winner of the John-Dos-Passos Award in 1985, he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Russell Banks had also written an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s book “On the road” for the cinema. And he was quick to say that literature wasn’t the only form of storytelling. “I was born in the 1940s. Hemingway, Faulkner were still alive and Fitzgerald had just died (…) At that time, the novel was the main form for telling stories,” he declared in “Le Monde”. “If I were 20 today, I’m not sure I would be a novelist. It’s very archaic! I think I’d be a director for the internet, because it’s the dominant form of storytelling,” he added.