Russell Banks, praised author of 'Cloudsplitter,' dies at 82
Banks, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, died Saturday in upstate New York, his editor, Dan Halpern, told The Associated Press. Joyce Carol Oates, who referred to Banks on Twitter as a great American writer and “beloved friend of so many," said he died peacefully in his home. “Cloudsplitter” was his most ambitious novel, a 750-page narrative on John Brown and his improbable quest to rid the country of slavery. “Cloudsplitter” reads like a prequel to Banks’ contemporary works, a summoning of Hawthorne and other early influences. His books often told of absent and otherwise failing fathers and Banks’ own father, Earl Banks, was an alcoholic whom the author says beat him as a child and left him with a permanently damaged left eye.
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