Balanced News: Russell Banks, praised author of ‘Cloudsplitter,’ dies at 82

NEW YORK — 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. Banks, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, died Saturday in upstate New York, his editor, Dan Halpern, told The Associated Press. “I loved Russell & loved his tremendous talent & magnanimous heart,” Oates wrote.