Russell Banks Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Art of the Story Books

Publication Order of The O. Henry Prize Collection Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Russell Banks is a published author of fiction, nonfiction, short stories, and poetry.

Russell was born on March 28, 1940, in Newton, Massachusetts. He grew up with his parents Florence and Early, who worked as a plumber. They were relatively poor and soon moved to Barnstead, New Hampshire to live. When the author was just 12 years old, his father decided to leave the family and deserted them to fend for themselves. Russell was given a scholarship to attend Colgate University but chose to drop out and travel throughout the south after he had been enrolled for just six weeks. He originally wanted to go to Cuba and join Castro’s army of insurgents, but ended up getting a job working in Lakeland, Florida in a department store. He would hit it off with the sales clerk there and get married. They share one daughter together.

He is known in his career as a novelist for offering the readers accounts of the strife of domestic life in detail and followed along with the struggles that everyday people had, characters that went through challenges daily and were frequently marginalized. He also usually writes stories that are centered around the experiences that he had in childhood and contain themes about morality as well as personal relationships in his life. They also tend to show people who are strong in the face of their own doubt and showing how resilient they are in the face of difficulty.

Today the author belongs to the International Parliament of Writers. He also is a member when it comes to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novels have been popular enough that they have warranted being translated into at least twenty languages! During the course of his distinguished career, Banks has received many accolades and awards and international prizes. He has written fiction as well as nonfiction (Dreaming Up America) and poetry.

Banks began writing during the fifties when residing in Miami, according to an interview he did with The Independent. However, The Paris Review has an interview with the author that puts his writing origins in Boston, so we may never know which of the two differing accounts is true. He would then go back to New England to live for a spell in 1964 before relocating to North Carolina. He was married again to Mary Gunst and would study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which was funded by Mary’s family in part. There he was part of the protesting as part of the Civil Rights Movement while belonging to Students for a Democratic Society.

Banks received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976. The next year he would get divorced from is wife, having been married for fourteen years. He would remarry to Kathy Walton, who was employed as an editor for Harper & Row. The two would be married for a period of five years. The author lives in upstate New York as well as Keene and spends his winters in Miami. He was also the State Author for New York for two years from 2004 to 2006 and served as the University of Maryland’s Artist-in-Residence. He has been a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.

Banks would later get married for a fourth time to Chase Twichell, a poet. He shares a total of four children, all daughters, from his marriages. He has received many prizes and awards along the way for his writing. These include the John Dos Passos Prize in 1985 for Fiction. He also was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986 and 1999 for his novels Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter. He was also made a Fellow in 1996 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Russell Banks is very well known for writing his novels The Sweet Hereafter as well as Affliction. The two books were adapted into movies and became feature length films released for theater-going audiences to enjoy in 1997. Banks would win an O. Henry Award for his collection Searching for Survivors, which houses his short stories. His followup short story collection was called The New World and was received quite well. He also made the shortlist for the Carnegie Medal for excellence in fiction in 2012 for Lost Memory of Skin.

Russell Banks is the author of Trailerpark, first released in 1981. If you love interesting and totally unique stories set in places that are one of a kind or are looking for something creative and fun to read, check this book out!

There are plenty of people who live at the Granite State Trailerpark and help make life interesting. The characters here each have their own quirks and their own things about them that make them unique. Here they all live in their trailers and have different interests and lives. Flora lives in 11 and is known for yelling at people to keep away from her ‘babies’, which is what she calls the numerous guinea pigs that she keeps in there.

Then there’s number 5, with Claudel. He actually thinks that he is a lucky guy, but quickly changes his tune when his wife decides to burn the trailer they share down and takes off with another guy. Then there’s Noni, who lives in 7. She tends to have phone conversations that she believes are being conducted with Jesus. These are just some of the people that live in this interesting New England trailer park, a combination witty, revealing, intriguing and more! Check out these short stories for yourself and see why this read is such a delight!

The Sweet Hereafter is a novel from Russell Banks released in 1991. Sam Dent is a small town that loses 14 kids in an accident. The citizens that live there must now deal with the aftermath of the tragedy and the question of what to do when something horrible happens– the worst thing that you can think of.

As the citizens and relatives of the deceased struggle to cope, these unique characters in a small town make for a novel that is unforgettable. Pick up a copy yourself to see what you think! The novel was based on a real life event, a bus crash in Alton, Texas.