The prolific American writer, novelist and screenwriter Russell Banks died last Saturday at the age of 82 in New York due to cancer, his literary agent, Ellen Levine, announced.
Banks knew how to represent like few others the vicissitudes of working-class Americans who struggle against problems of poverty, race and class, a job that placed him among the first ranks of contemporary novelists.
In total, he wrote 21 works between fiction and nonfiction and two of them, Continental Drift (1985) and Cloudcracker (1998), were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. The first was heralded with a bold statement: “This is a late-20th-century American story.”
In the monumental Rompenubes he addressed the existence of John Brown, the legendary American anti-slavery hero, told by his son through a background North America full of shadows and lights. “I’m interested in the whole question of the possibility of heroism, especially in a secular age and in a democratic society,” he said in an interview about the book’s foundation.
Born in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of a violent, alcoholic plumber who left the family when Banks was 12, and a homemaker, Banks was a self-proclaimed heir to 19th-century writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, who aspired to the high art and a deep understanding of the spirit of the country. Among his novels, Affliction (1992) and Como en otro mundo (1994) also stand out, which were made into movies with great critical success.
