Russell Earl Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on 28 March 1940 to Earl and Florence Banks, but he was raised in Barnstead, New Hampshire. Earl Banks, a pipe fitter, was an alcoholic and left his wife and four children when Russell, the oldest, was twelve. He was bright, and he enrolled at Colgate University in 1958 on a full scholarship but returned home that November, apparently unable or unwilling to live and learn with the sons of wealthy, privileged families. He then made an abortive attempt to join Fidel Castro's army in Cuba but ended up in Lakeland, Florida. He married Darlene Bennett there in June 1960, and she later gave birth to the first of his four daughters, Leona. Banks has been married four times. The mother of his second wife, the poet Mary Gunst, whom he married in 1962, paid for his four years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1967. His marriage to Gunst ended in 1977, and he married Kathy Banks, an editor, in 1982. After their 1988 divorce he married the poet Chase Twichell. The autobiographical elements in Banks's fiction provide more than just credentials for a writer in the blue-collar genre; in his case, they seem to help him evoke a haunting tone, a palpable mood of despair, and harrowing, realistic details.
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