Russell Banks, an award-winning fiction writer who imagined the dreams and downfalls of everyone from modern blue-collar workers to the radical abolitionist John Brown in “Cloudsplitter," has died. He was 82.
NEW YORK Russell Banks, an award-winning fiction writer who rooted such novels as "Affliction" and "The Sweet Hereafter" in the wintry, rural communities of his native Northeast and imagined the dreams and downfalls of everyone from modern blue-collar workers to the radical abolitionist John Brown in "Cloudsplitter," has died. He was 82.