“Cloudsplitter: A Novel,” by Russell Banks, is a 750-page missive that tells the story of John Brown’s lifelong fight against slavery through his son, Owen’s, eyes. The author lived in Keene, New York, for many years until his death in 2023. He wrote poetry, short stories and 12 novels, which include “The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction.” “Cloudsplitter,” published almost 30 years ago, is not meant to be a historical book; it is, instead, a fascinating story of how religion, morality, race and love shape Owen’s beliefs and behavior in support of his father’s life’s work. Owen’s perspective diverges from historical accounts of the events surrounding his father’s increasingly radical acts against slavery. This subjective re-telling of his part in the story renders him unreliable as a narrator, yet Owen tells the truth as he remembers it.

Owen, born in 1824 in Hudson, Ohio, was the third of Brown’s six sons and the most involved in his famous father’s abolitionist battles. His account of the events that influenced American history take the form of a confessional letter to Miss Mayo, a fictional research assistant to the real Oswald Garrison Villard, who is writing Owen’s biography in the novel and really did write a biography called “John Brown: 1800-1859, A Biography Fifty Years After.”

Owen fought with his father in Kansas, at the Pottawatomie Massacre, and he helped plan the Harper’s Ferry Raid in 1859, which led to the deaths of two younger brothers and his father being executed for treason, murder, conspiring with enslaved people to rebel and inciting a slave insurrection.

During his family’s fight to abolish slavery, he met Frederick Douglass, his father’s close friend, and worked with Harriet Tubman to carry slaves to freedom through the North Elba Underground Railroad.

In the 40 years since his father’s hanging in 1859, he has lived as a hermit in the San Gabriel Mountains in California. Now, in 1899, he is 75 yrs old and says he is dying. In the novel, he returns to his family farm in North Elba to attend the interment of his brothers and friends who died during the Harper’s Ferry raid. Once he has finished writing his own letters to Miss Mayo, he plans to give her the hundreds of letters his father wrote over the years, along with every document he owns. Then he plans to shoot himself in his homestead, which faces his beloved Tahawus a.k.a. Cloudsplitter a.k.a. Mount Marcy. He says he has kept his silence all these years to allow people to write their own histories of the events, but now he can’t die peacefully until the truth is told. In real life, he died in Pasadena, California, in 1889. His life and work were celebrated across the country, even though he lived as a hermit after he fled the scene of the Pottawatomie killings.

For a clear historical perspective, pair this novel with “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” by David S. Reynolds; “To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown” by Stephen B. Oates; or “Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War” by Tony Horowitz. Another option is “John Brown in New York: The Man, His Family, and the Adirondack Landscape” by Sandra Weber, which Jerry McGovern reviewed in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise a couple of weeks ago.