Stephen P. Banks

Stephen Preston Banks's new novel, CASHDOWN'S FOLLY, is a family saga of the pioneer Musgrave family in post-Reconstruction era Washington Territory. This historical fiction portrays the courage, resilience, compromises, triumphs, and losses of intrepid Northwest frontier settlers, as it follows them through the epochal changes of the late 19th Century. His earlier novel, KOKIO, narrates a fictionalized life of the long-neglected and nearly forgotten adventurer, travel writer and espionage agent Neill James. She is recovered from obscurity in the voices of seven persons who knew and cared deeply for her--fellow spies, a distant relative, would-be lovers and dedicated friends. Banks's earlier books include the anthologies FICTION AND SOCIAL RESEARCH and DISSENT AND THE FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP, and the monograph MULTICULTURAL PUBLIC RELATIONS.. His short stories, poems and translations have appeared in regional magazines and websites in the Pacific Northwest. His current project is a study of British writer Sybille Bedford's exile in North America during the Second World War. Banks is Professor Emeritus at the University of Idaho, where he taught and published scholarly research for over two decades. He also taught at Arizona State University, the University of Southern California, and the University of The Basque Country and lectured at universities in Gothenburg and Örebro, Sweden, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife, Anna Banks, on an island off the coast of Washington State..