Russell Banks
Russell Banks
Russell Banksis 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"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth28 March 1940
CountryUnited States of America
american-author book good prizes work writer
The prizes have some credibility, of course. And they do good work for the writer and for the publisher, by winnowing one book out of the pack.
funny
That was the funny part of the reading.
american-author career earlier influenced parts writers
I think probably in the earlier parts of my career I was influenced by writers such as Hawthorne and Melville - the American classics.
american-author grows invented
I don't want it to be all that self-conscious or artificial, but it really grows out of my having invented myself as a listener so that I could hear her voice.
dividing issues
So the same cultural and political issues that divided us in 1968 are still dividing us.
american-author graduate prefer princeton students taught teaching
I taught at Princeton and it was undergraduate and I much prefer teaching undergraduates to graduate students in writing programs.
american-author darkness demanding energy far full lucky stories
So far I've been very lucky in that stories have come to me like a thunderstorm, unexpected, full of darkness and energy demanding all my attention.
american-author hard produce understood work
And of course, it's hard to produce a work at the end of those years of solitude, which may or may not be understood or appreciated.
flip lights
All you could do was flip switches and make lights blink.
storytelling allegiance majors
My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.
reality years solitude
It's hard to spend years at a time working in total solitude with no reality-check.
hunting hands stories
But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.
reading boys artist
I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature.
couple years nyu
A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.