Russell Banks, the acclaimed novelist who died of cancer earlier this month at the age of eighty-two, did not so far as I know identify as a socialist. But he did describe himself as a person of the Left, and in 1985 he wrote a profile for the Atlantic of the then-not-widely-known socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

Banks’s piece assumed the tone of a mainstream magazine, but one could sense his admiration for the radical ideas, quirky charisma, and earnest attention to everyday workers that mark Sanders’s political appeal. Banks contended that Sanders’s narrow victory in 1981 — by only ten votes — and his subsequent reelections by increasingly wide margins were “due to [his] willingness to work long hours, day after day, week after week, knocking on doors, speaking to crowds until his voice went hoarse, . . .  evoking from his supporters a kind of passionate loyalty that a party machine or patronage can never generate. An ideology can generate that kind of self-sacrifice, however, and so can a remarkable personality. Sanders had both going for him.”

Although written in the 1980s, Banks’s piece was not published until October 2015, shortly before Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire Democratic primary by more than 20 percent. In a May 2016 interview, Banks noted that he had voted for Sanders in the Florida primary. He noted, too, the decades-long consistency of Sanders’s message: “[H]e has been saying the same kinds of things all along. His loyalties are, indeed, to the working classes and to the average man and woman in America and his targets have always been the plutocracy as he sees it that controls and manipulates the American economy and therefore American society.”