The story long precedes Banks’ lifetime, but the inspiration was literally close to home. “Cloudsplitter” was his most ambitious novel, a 750-page narrative on John Brown and his improbable quest to rid the country of slavery. But he had never believed it would come to this, to nothing,” Banks wrote. “His brother’s strut and brag were empty from the start, and in a deep, barely conscious way, Bob knew that all along and forgave him his strut and brag simply because he knew they were empty.

In Banks’ critical breakthrough “Continental Drift,” published in 1985, oil burner repairman Bob Dubois flees from his native New Hampshire and goes into business with his wealthy brother in Florida, only to learn his brother’s life was as hollow as his own. Snow fell often in his fiction, from the upstate New York community torn by a bus crash in “The Sweet Hereafter” to the desperate, divorced New Hampshire policeman undone by his paranoid fantasies in “Affliction.”

He was a plumber’s son who wrote often about working class families - whether those who died trying to break out, caught up in a “kind of madness” that the past can be erased, or those like himself who got away and survived and asked “Why me, Lord?”īanks lived part of the year in Florida, and for a time had a home in Jamaica, but he was essentially a man of the North, with an old Puritan’s sense of consequences. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, and raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Banks was a self-styled heir to such 19th century writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, aspiring to high art and a deep grasp of the country’s spirit.

Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks