Novelist Russell Banks has passed away at the age of 82 from cancer. He wrote such books as Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, setting them in the rural areas of the Northeastern U.S. He died on Saturday at home in upstate New York, as reported by AP News.
Banks was a professor emeritus at Princeton, where he was colleagues with fellow author Joyce Carol Oates.
“I loved Russell and loved his tremendous talent and magnanimous heart,” Oates wrote. “Cloudsplitter [was] his masterpiece, but all his work is exceptional.”
Born and raised in New England, Banks was considered by many to be a modern-day version of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman in the way he wrote about the spirit of the country. He was the son of a plumber, and never forgot about where he came from – as shown by his writing.
Banks was a two-time finalist for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for his novels Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift. He also won the Anisfield-Wolf Award in 1999 for Cloudsplitter.
He was also no stranger to having his books seen on the silver screen. In 1997, The Sweet Hereafter was made into a film starring Ian Holm, and Affliction was adapted to film that same year, starring Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, and Willem Dafoe. For that role, James Coburn won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Russell is survived by his wife, poet Chase Twichell, as well as his daughters Lea, Caerthan, Maia, and Danis, three siblings, two grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter.