Russell Banks

the long version

In this first full-length study, Robert Niemi provides a comprehensive view of Russell Banks's life and literary career, including his poetry, collected short fiction, and eight novels. Niemi examines Banks's complex evolution from counterculture aesthete to committed social critic. He argues a high degree of both political and aesthetic sophistication enable Banks to balance his narratives between chronicle and social critique. Stressing the author's "dual voice," a voice that moves inside and outside the blue-collar experience, Niemi reveals Banks as a political writer through and through, a writer devoted to telling the often horrifying truth about life in the modern world - not in an effort to titillate or shock or indulge in fashionable despair but in the hopes of illuminating a dark time for better times to come.