Author Russell Banks sets new novel near his home
Posted by admin
By Belinda Goldsmith
NEW YORK (Reuters) - American writer Russell Banks set out to be a painter but abandoned his brushes for a career as a writer that has spanned five decades.
Banks, 67, who has published five short story collections, 11 novels and four poetry collections, has been described as possibly “the leading voice of the working class experience in modern American letters.”
His newly-released 11th novel, “The Reserve,” has love stories overlapping with social history and mystery in the 1930s America and is set in the Adirondack Mountains where Banks has lived for the past two decades.
One of the characters is loosely based on illustrator Rockwell Kent who lived in the Adirondacks.
Banks, whose novels “Cloudsplitter” and “Continental Drift” were Pulitzer Prize finalists, spoke to Reuters about writing:
Q: Did you always want to be a writer?
A: “Not at all. I thought I was going to be an artist, a painter, not a writer. I didn’t have much of a literary bent but I did for painting because I had a visible talent. It’s like music. If you are talented it shows early on but with writing you might be articulate or tell a lot of lies but that won’t necessarily translate into fiction.”
Q: When did you start to focus on writing? Continued…
