Russell Banks, award-winning fiction writer, dies at 82

American novelist wrote about rural working class communities and those who died trying to break out in his native north-east

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 north-east and imagined the dreams and downfalls of everyone from modern blue-collar workers to the radical abolitionist John Brown, has died. He was 82.

Banks, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, died Saturday in upstate New York, his editor, Dan Halpern, told the Associated Press. Banks was being treated for cancer, Halpern said.