Because of his attention to working-class people and the disenfranchised in America, several critics have classified him with "grit-lit" writers such as Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and even Denis Johnson, but such comparisons are inadequate to describe accurately his place in American literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Russell Earl Banks was born on 28 March 1940 in Newton, Massachusetts, to Earl and Florence Taylor Banks; his father was a plumber, as was his grandfather. In 1952 Earl Banks, a violent man and an alcoholic, deserted his family, leaving his wife, three sons, and a daughter. Florence Banks moved the family to Barnstead, New Hampshire, and later to Wakefield, Massachusetts. She sued for divorce, got custody of the children, and undertook a series of clerical jobs to support the family. In reflections on this time in his life, Banks has described his mother as hardworking but self-absorbed and himself as a twelve-year-old called upon to be the male head of a family moving from apartment to apartment, living close to poverty.
At sixteen, Banks left home with a friend in a stolen car, getting as far as Pasadena, California, a trip that cost him a scholarship that had been offered by Phillips Andover Academy.
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