SOURCE: McPherson, James M. “A Fictional Portrait of John Brown.” Atlantic Monthly 281, no. 5 (May 1998): 124-29.

In the following review, McPherson views Cloudsplitter as not only a biographical account of John Brown and his family, but also as an exploration of the complex relationship between generational and racial divides.

Cloudsplitter is the English word for the Indian name of Mount Tahawus, in the Adirondacks, 120 miles north of Albany and near the rural community of North Elba, where the abolitionist John Brown established a home in 1849. But the real cloudsplitter in this novel [Cloudsplitter] is John Brown himself, who launched lightning strikes against pro-slavery settlers in Kansas and whose thunderbolt descent on Harpers Ferry, in 1859, lit flames of civil war that were not fully quenched even at Appomattox, six years later. Russell Banks has constructed this complex narrative on two levels. The first is the story of John Brown and...