Russell Banks

Russell Banks
Russell Banks at the 2011 Texas Book Festival.
Born	(1940-03-28) March 28, 1940 (age 76) Newton, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American
Notable works	Continental Drift, Affliction, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Darling
Spouse	Chase Twichell

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.

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.