Russell Banks, praised author of ‘Cloudsplitter,’ dies at 82 NEW YORK (AP) — 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.Joyce Carol Oates, a former Princeton colleague who referred to Banks on Twitter as a great American writer and “beloved friend of so many,” said he died peacefully in his home.He was a plumber’s son who wrote often about working class families — whether those who died trying to break out, caught up in a “kind of madness” that the past can be erased, or those like himself who got away and survived and asked “Why me, Lord?” Prince Harry accuses Camilla of 'dangerous' leaks to media Review: Julia Wolf comes out of the shadows to slay Famed Danish restaurant Noma to start new 'flavor search' Wife of 'American Horror Story' driver sues over COVID death Banks lived part of the year in Florida, and for a time had a home in Jamaica, but he was essentially a man of the North, with an old Puritan’s sense of consequences.Snow fell often in his fiction, from the upstate New York community torn by a bus crash in “The Sweet Hereafter” to the desperate, divorced New Hampshire policeman undone by his paranoid fantasies in “Affliction.” In Banks’ critical breakthrough “Continental Drift,” published in 1985, oil burner repairman Bob Dubois flees from his native New Hampshire and goes into business with his wealthy brother in Florida, only to learn his brother’s life was as hollow as his own.“His brother’s strut and brag were empty from the start, and in a deep, barely conscious way, Bob knew that all along and forgave him his strut and brag simply because he knew they were empty."