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Cloudsplitter| Author: | Russell Banks | | Publisher: | Harper Flamingo |
Banks's ambitious portrait of abolitionist John Brown, whose famed (and failed) attempt to liberate slaves in the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry earned him a place in American history books as both martyr and madman, is fictionalized history, not historical
fiction. Cloudsplitter imagines for Brown a storyline of familial and romantic turmoil, as remembered by his 75-year-old son Owen, forty years after his father's death (he was executed for his role at Harpers Ferry). As Owen recounts an impoverished
childhood, his acquaintance with Negroes in the Underground Railroad, and his role as a member of the “Army of God”, his egomania emerges and his reliability as narrator becomes fascinatingly suspect. Banks's book turns into a sprawling inquiry into the
religious apocalyptic fervor that fueled Brown's abolitionist politics and the violence at Harpers, held together by beautiful prose and gripping detail.
Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. More on Cloudsplitter from Infoplease:
- Russell Banks - Biography of Russell Banks, Author of The Sweet Hereafter
- Russell Banks - Russell Banks writer Born: 3/28/1940 Birthplace: Newton, Mass. Banks's hardscrabble ...
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