Cloudsplitter
by Russell Banks

List Price: $15.00
Pages: 768
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060930861
Publisher: HarperCollins

Russell Banks was born and raised in New Hampshire. At age 27, he graduated from the University of North Carolina and began teaching Freshman Composition. His first novel, Searching for Survivors, was published at age 35 by Fiction Collective. After thirteen works of fiction, including such acclaimed novels as Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Affliction, and The Sweet Hereafter (the latter two of which have been made into films), Banks has now produced one of the most important bodies of work in contemporary literature: Cloudsplitter. Ten years ago, he and his wife, the poet Chase Twichell, bought a second home in Keene, NY, not far from John Brown's grave. This proximity to a landscape that was so much a part of John Brown's story partially led Banks to begin thinking about his legendary neighbor, and he realized Brown's story had all the themes "[he'd] been concerned with, some would say obsessed with, for 20 years--the relationships between parents and children, particularly fathers and sons, and the interconnections between politics and religion and race."

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