Banks developed his narrative experiments with point of view while deepening his exploration of themes on the barriers of race and class. The working-class New Englander and his struggle with violence became the focus of his next two novels, Hamilton Stark (1978) and The Book of Jamaica (1980). A second collection of short stories, The New World (1978), received acclaim for its blending of historical and semiautobiographical material.

His first novel, Family Life, was not a critical success, but Banks’s next volume, a collection of short stories, Searching for Survivors, won an O. In 1974 he published a volume of poetry, Snow: Meditations on a Cautious Man in Winter. The 1971 volume of The Best American Short Stories included fiction by Banks. He was graduated with honors from North Carolina in 1967 and returned to New Hampshire where he taught at Emerson College in Boston and the University of New Hampshire at Durham. Throughout the 1960s, Banks contributed short stories to a variety of literary magazines. There he cofounded a small literary publishing house and magazine, Lillabulero. Soon after, he entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lived briefly in Boston, where he began to write short fiction and poetry, before returning to New Hampshire in 1964. An excellent student, winning a full scholarship to Colgate University, he dropped out in his first year with the intention of joining Fidel Castro’s insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida. Banks helped provide for his mother and three siblings. His father, a plumber, deserted the family when Banks was twelve. Russell Banks was born on Main Newton, Massachusetts and raised in the small town of Barnstead, New Hampshire, the son of Earl and Florence Banks. Interviewed by Robert Faggen Issue 147, Summer 1998

Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks