Banks, a Princeton University professor emeritus, died Saturday in upstate New York, his editor Dan Halpern told The Associated Press.
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Banks was being treated for cancer, Halpern said, along with Joyce Carol Oates, who called Banks a great American writer and "a dear friend to many" on Twitter.
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Born in Newton, Massachusetts, and raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Banks was a self-styled heir to 19th-century writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.
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Who had a deep sense of high art and patriotism.
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He was the son of a plumber who wrote often about working-class families who died trying to break out.
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caught up in the "madness" of erasing the past, and those like himself who fled and survived
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Banks lived part of the year in Florida, and for a time had his home in Jamaica, but he was essentially a man of the North, with a spirit of consequence of the old Puritans.
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In Banks' seminal success "Continental Drift," published in 1985, oil burner repairman Bob DuBois flees his native New Hampshire and goes into business with his wealthy brother in Florida.
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Only to find that his brother's life was as hollow as his own.