This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. Coole, Infertary Gross.

Russell Banks, the author whose best-selling books include

Affliction, Continental Drift, and The Sweet Hereafter,

died of cancer Sunday. He was 82 years old.

Banks was born in 1940 and grew up in Barnstead, New Hampshire.

In the early 1960s, he was a pipefitter working for his father,

who, like his father before him, was a plumber.

But Banks' father also was an alcoholic and abusive.

Memories the son dealt with by becoming a writer and examining them

in such novels as Affliction.

A movie version of that novel won an Oscar for actor James Coburn,

and the film version of Banks' The Sweet Hereafter won the grand prize

at the Cannes Film Festival.

His novel's Continental Drift and Cloud Splitter,

about the abolitionist John Brown, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Russell Banks taught writing at Princeton University.

Terry Gross interviewed him in 1989 when he had just published Affliction.

That novel asks if it's possible to break the chain of male violence.

It's narrated by a character named Rolf Whitehouse,

who tells the story of how his brother Wade turned into a man even more violent than their father.

I'd like you to do a reading from Affliction,

and this is a scene in which the father who beats his wife and his children

...