An American author who took inspiration from predecessors as diverse as Homer, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nelson Algren and Mark Twain, Russell Banks’s critically acclaimed works of fiction and poetry have been translated into 20 languages. The ingenious ironies of Banks’s writing and his sly wit deserve a detailed analysis and explanation.
Despite being a globally successful writer who has been published for over 30 years and is credited with two successful movies based on his work, there is but one prior study of Russell Banks’s work in English, which is now nearly a decade old. Russell Banks: In Search of Freedom offers the only modern, complete commentary on his work and establishes Banks as one of the leaders in the postmodern, neorealist tradition of American fiction.
This critical guide contains a brief biography of Banks, describing the details of his life that shaped his philosophies, plot themes, and settings, such as New England and the Caribbean. Russell Banks then illustrates how Banks moved beyond his working-class origins and explored problems in race, communication, sexual and family relations, religion, popular culture, landscape, and more recently, the upper class. The final chapter explains Banks’s unique vision of American history and liberty.
