He mined a hardscrabble childhood for his novels
In his 1978 novel “Hamilton Stark,” Russell Banks described a scene much like the places his fictional characters often inhabit in his more than two dozen books, many set in the poor, rural communities of New Hampshire and northern New York.
Glancing out his vehicle’s window, a driver in “Stark” sees “the pink and aqua house trailers along the road, the two-room shacks with rusted stovepipes poking through the roofs, the old farmhouses boarded up or half-covered against the winter with flapping sheets of polyethylene.”
Visible, too, were “the gaptoothed children with matted hair and dirty rashes on their round faces playing by the side of the road.” Inside and between the houses were “the blank, gray faces of young women and the old men’s and old women’s faces collapsing like rotted fruit, the broken toys and tools and ravaged carcasses of old cars lying randomly in the packed-dirt yards.”
Mr. Banks, who emerged from his own hardscrabble New England childhood to become an acclaimed writer and an Ivy League professor whose novels were adapted into memorable movies, died Sunday at home in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., of cancer, his literary agent, Ellen Levine, told The New York Times.
At 82, he had traveled a greater distance than miles could measure from his childhood in Barnstead, N.H. — where his father beat him so badly that his left eye was permanently damaged — and from his youth in Wakefield, where reading Walt Whitman’s poetry helped inspire Mr. Banks to become a writer.
A Princeton University professor emeritus, he previously had taught at Emerson College and the University of New Hampshire, and two of his novels, “Continental Drift” and “Cloudsplitter,” were Pulitzer Prize finalists for fiction.
In “Drift” (1985), tragedy awaits a blue-collar New Hampshire worker who decamps to Florida for better opportunities and becomes en
tangled with a Haitian woman who is trying to escape poverty. “Cloudsplitter” (1998) tells the story of abolitionist John Brown.
Though Mr. Banks cautioned that his books were never strictly autobiographical, he dedicated his 1989 novel “Affliction” to his father, Earl Banks. Set in New Hampshire, the book featured a physically abusive, alcoholic father who resembled Earl. James Coburn won a best supporting actor Oscar for portraying the father in the movie version of the book.
“The Sweet Hereafter,” about a small-town school bus accident that kills 14 children, was published two years after “Affliction” and also was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film.
To achieve such success, Mr. Banks had to wrench himself away from his father’s legacy of violence and, as an adult, come to terms with the aging man who had inflicted so much damage — first through beatings, then by abandoning the family when Mr. Banks was in early adolescence.
As a young adult, “I was one of the barroom-brawling drunken young men,” Mr. Banks told the Globe in 1989. “That kind of behavior was so inextricably bound up with my relationship with my father that the way to control the behavior was to work out my relationship with my father.”
After dropping out of college at 18, Mr. Banks traveled to Florida and married before turning 20. He then returned to New England, where for a time he worked alongside his father, both as plumbers.
In a 1998 Paris Review interview, Mr. Banks said he told his father one day that he hated plumbing: “He looked at me with puzzlement and said, ‘You think I like it?’ I realized, ‘My God, of course not.’ “
His father “was a very bright man, talented in many ways. But he grew up in the Depression and when he got out of high school at 16 he went right to work to help support the family.”
Mr. Banks told the Globe in 1998 that by the time his father died, “I had really made my peace with him. I had come to see the world through his eyes, and I could see that the anger and the bitterness and the depression were acquired early on.”
His father had also “been abused physically as a kid. His father abused him, and he came up in a rough time in a rough way, and I don’t think he quite got over it, and also there was his alcoholism. But I came to understand that, and I really let go of any bitterness and anger that I might have had as a result of what he had put on me.”
Born in Newton on March 28, 1940, Mr. Banks was the oldest of four siblings. The family “moved a lot,” he told the Globe in 1995. “We never had much money.”
Those travels brought the family to California during World War II, according to the 2010 obit for his mother, Florence Taylor Banks, who was a bookkeeper and a single mother after Earl abandoned her and the children.
A talented artist as a boy and an able high school student in Wakefield, Mr. Banks earned a scholarship to Colgate University in upstate New York, but left after eight weeks, feeling out of place among more affluent classmates. “I had no choice but to flee. I stole away in the night, literally,” he told the Paris Review. “Hitchhiked my way out in a snowstorm with all my belongings in a backpack.”
Mr. Banks headed south, intending to join Fidel Castro’s army in Cuba, but he stayed in Florida, where he and his wife had one daughter and Mr. Banks worked dressing a department store’s window display mannequins.
Returning to Greater Boston, he tracked down his father and mixed writing short stories with blue-collar jobs. Mr. Banks’s first marriage ended and his motherin-law in his second marriage paid for him to finish college at the University of North Carolina.
He launched his teaching career at colleges such as Emerson and UNH, and fell in with a Boston writing crowd that gathered at the South End home of poet William Corbett. “I just felt blessed to be in that circle,” Mr. Banks said for Corbett’s 2018 obit.
Mr. Banks’s first three marriages, to Darlene Bennett, Mary Gunst, and Kathy Walton, ended in divorce.
In 1989, he married the poet Chase Twichell. For years, they divided their time mostly between Princeton (when Mr. Banks was a professor); the Adirondacks community of Keene, N.Y.; and Florida.
According to the Times, those he leaves include Twichell and his four daughters from his first two marriages, Lea, Caerthan, Maia, and Danis; a brother, Stephen; a sister, Linda; a half-sister, Kathleen Banks-Nutter; two grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Service information was not immediately available.
In a 2008 Globe review of Mr. Banks’s novel “The Reserve,” the late Vermont writer Howard Frank Mosher said that his willingness throughout his career to confront “the hard truths about the world we live in, and to follow those truths to whatever dark places they may lead, goes a long way toward explaining his longstanding reputation as one of America’s finest contemporary fiction writers.
For Mr. Banks, those truths included being frank in his fiction about how gender, race, and social class shape lives, and just as forthright in his personal life about his privileges as a white man who had climbed from near-poverty in Wakefield to an Ivy League professorship.
“I don’t see American life, generally, across the board, without a racial or class dimension,” he said in a 2003 interview with January magazine. “And so the work is going to reflect that.”
Though Mr. Banks cautioned that his books were never strictly autobiographical, he dedicaterd his 1989 novel ‘Affliction’ to his father, Earl Banks. The book featured a physically abusive, alcoholic father who resembled Earl.