In almost half a century of writing, he had built one of the most progressive and anti-conformist works in contemporary American literature. He died on Saturday at the age of 82.
by Florence Noville
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, long professor of Creative Writing in Princeton (New Jersey) alongside his sister Joyce Carol Oates, the novelist, novelist and American poet Russell Banks, author notably of beautiful Lendemans and affliction (Actes Sud, like almost all of his books, 1999 and 1998), died in New York on Saturday January 7, announced its publisher Dan Halpern, at the Associated Press agency. He was 82 years old.
Elegance, commitment, empathy. These three “e” applied Russell Banks magnificently, who, in almost half a century of writing, had built one of the most progressive and anti-conformist works in contemporary American literature. Very active politically, not hesitating to openly criticize his government – he had notably taken a position against the American intervention in Iraq and against the Patriot Act -, Banks also, from 1998 to 2004, chaired the international parliament of writers created by Salman Rushdie and founded the organization Cities of Refuge North America, a network of asylum places for writers exiled or threatened.
Born March 28, 1940 in Newton (Massachusets), Banks was not 12 years old when his father, plumber, deserted the family home. Dogging and abandonment mark him forever, foreshadowing the two recurring themes, almost haunting, which form the frame of his work, the life of the humble, on the one hand, the quest for the paternal figure, on the other.
Revelation meeting
He is a substitution father who, moreover, will decide on his destiny. We were in the early 1960s. After a childhood in New Hampshire and unfinished studies at the University of North Carolina, the young Banks, who describes himself as angry and self -destructive, decides to see the country. He burns and contracts the virus from elsewhere. From the Caribbean to Gorée, from Curaçao to the Everglades, from Kathmandu to the Adirondacks, he will later become one of the best Travel Writers of his generation, constantly in search of what he called “erotic, narcotic or sybarian renewals”. At 18, when he also earns his life as a plumber, he discovered reading in a library in Miami. Walt Whitman, Faulkner, Hemingway enchant him so much that he begins to write. He is 22 years old when he advised a little announcement praising the merits of a writing workshop in the depths of Vermont. How does this kind of “workshop” consist of? He doesn’t really know it, but decides to send the manuscript of a novel he has just finished.
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