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
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.
clever reading writing
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
art reading writing
But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.
book reading kids
I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
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.