In much of Mr. Banks’s writing, his concerns about race, class and power repeatedly surfaced, with particular attention given to the powerless and the overlooked, especially his outwardly unremarkable blue-collar characters.
“There’s an important tradition in American writing, going back to Mark Twain and forward to Raymond Carver and Grace Paley, whose work is generated by love of people who are scorned and derided,” Mr. Banks told The Guardian in 2000. “I have an almost simple-minded affection for them. My readers are not the same as my characters, as I’m very aware. So I’m glad when they feel that affection too.”
Russell Earl Banks was born on March 28, 1940, in Newton, Mass., just west of Boston. His father, Earl Banks, was a plumber, and his mother, Florence (Taylor) Banks, was a homemaker and bookkeeper.
The eldest of four children, Russell was raised in Barnstead, N.H., a small town about 90 miles to the north. He was open about his father’s alcoholism and the physical abuse his father inflicted on him as a child — a blow to the head cost him the mobility of his left eye — but he also acknowledged his conflicting feelings about him.
“I don’t remember not being physically afraid of my father,” he told People magazine in 1989. “I hated my father, and I adored him.”
Earl Banks left when Russell was 12, and the family moved back to Massachusetts, settling in Wakefield, where Russell worked odd jobs to help support his mother and siblings. He excelled in school, earning a full scholarship to Colgate University and becoming the first in his family to attend college.
