It was another great American novelist, Joyce Carol Oates, also a painter of a society sick with its violence and its inequalities, who was one of the first to pay tribute to him, announcing on Twitter that his friend Russell Banks had "passed away peacefully at his home in upstate New York."

"I loved Russell and I adored his immense talent and his generous heart. + Cloudslayer + (was) his masterpiece, but all his work is exceptional", wrote on Twitter the author, who taught writing as Russell Banks at Princeton University (New Jersey).

From "Affliction" (1989), a dark psychological portrait of a policeman adapted for the cinema by Paul Schrader in 1997, to "Des belles matins" (1991), an account with several voices of a town in the State of New York traumatized by a school bus accident, his novels were steeped in the life of the working classes, from which he came.

Novelist, short-story writer and poet, Russell Banks loved to tell the hardships of the working class through characters who struggle with poverty, drug addiction, class and racial issues.

"As a writer, I'm lucky. But as an American citizen, I'm pessimistic," he said in an interview in the French newspaper Le Monde in 2016. "The middle class has become poorer, Americans no longer believe that their children will live better than them, or even as well," he added, showing his support for Democrat Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump.

Among his best-known books were "Cloud Slayer" (1998), a historical novel about American abolitionist John Brown, or "American Darling", a saga-like portrait of an American from the left-wing bourgeoisie who exile in Liberia.

His last novel, "Oh, Canada", an end-of-life story, was released in 2022.

Politics

Born in Newton, in the northeastern United States, on March 28, 1940, Russell Banks grew up in a modest environment, and his plumber father left the family home when he was twelve years old.

The father figure is often present in his books, as in "Cloud Slayer".

After his studies, he left to discover the world, in particular Jamaica, a trip from which he made a book ("The Book of Jamaica") and then earned his living as a plumber.

His life as an author will begin when he tries his luck at a writing workshop in Vermont (northeast).

Another American writer, Neslon Algren, took him under his wing.

His first novel, "Family Life", appeared in 1975.

Politically active, Russell Banks took a stand against the American military intervention in Iraq and against the Patriot Act.

He had also chaired the International Parliament of Writers created by Salman Rushdie and founded the organization Cities of Refuge North America, a network of places of asylum for exiled or threatened writers.

Winner of the John-Dos-Passos prize in 1985, he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Russell Banks had also written an adaptation of Jack Kerouac's book "On the road" for the cinema.

And he readily said that literature was not the only form of storytelling.

"I was born in the 1940s. Hemingway, Faulkner were still alive and Fitzgerald had just died (...) At that time, the novel was the major form for telling stories", he had declared in Le Monde.

"If I was 20 today, I'm not sure I would become a novelist. It's very archaic! I think I would be a director for the Internet because it's the dominant form of storytelling," added- he.

© 2023 AFP