![]() The convergence of lives and experiences around violence and tragedy also informs his next novels, Affliction (1989) and The Sweet Hereafter (1991), both of which were recently made into motion pictures. The Relation of My Imprisonment, based on the religious and moral struggles of a seventeenth-century coffin builder, followed in 1984.īanks ascended to the first rank of American novelists in 1985 with the publication of Continental Drift, a dual-point-of-view work about an oil-burner repairman from New Hampshire and a Haitian refugee. An interrelated collection of short stories, Trailerpark (1981), brought Banks widespread critical acclaim. Banks developed his narrative experiments with point of view while deepening his exploration of themes on the barriers of race and class. The working-class New Englander and his struggle with violence became the focus of his next two novels, Hamilton Stark (1978) and The Book of Jamaica (1980). A second collection of short stories, The New World (1978), received acclaim for its blending of historical and semiautobiographical material. His first novel, Family Life, was not a critical success, but Banks’s next volume, a collection of short stories, Searching for Survivors, won an O. In 1974 he published a volume of poetry, Snow: Meditations on a Cautious Man in Winter. The 1971 volume of The Best American Short Stories included fiction by Banks. He was graduated with honors from North Carolina in 1967 and returned to New Hampshire where he taught at Emerson College in Boston and the University of New Hampshire at Durham. Throughout the 1960s, Banks contributed short stories to a variety of literary magazines. There he cofounded a small literary publishing house and magazine, Lillabulero. Soon after, he entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lived briefly in Boston, where he began to write short fiction and poetry, before returning to New Hampshire in 1964. An excellent student, winning a full scholarship to Colgate University, he dropped out in his first year with the intention of joining Fidel Castro’s insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida. Banks helped provide for his mother and three siblings. His father, a plumber, deserted the family when Banks was twelve. Russell Banks was born on Main Newton, Massachusetts and raised in the small town of Barnstead, New Hampshire, the son of Earl and Florence Banks. Interviewed by Robert Faggen Issue 147, Summer 1998
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