Acclaimed Novelist Russell Banks Dies of Cancer at 82

Award-winning novelist Russell Banks, who rose to prominence with stories of hardscrabble New England communities dealing with the intractable issues of poverty and racial strife, died Sunday at his home in upstate New York. He was 82. Banks’ agent told The New York Times he died of cancer, which he had been receiving treatment for. Banks was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist in the fiction category, for his titles “Continental Drift” (1985) and “Cloudsplitter” (1998). He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of a plumber who explored working-class issues in nearly all of his 21 books. Longtime friend and fellow Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates shared her condolences on Twitter, writing: “I loved Russell & loved his tremendous talent & magnanimous heart. ‘Cloudsplitter’ [is] his masterpiece. but all his work is exceptional.”