Considered a mentor of the Davenport Group of writers in Iowa, he later moved to Seattle.

[2] As a poetically-inclined traveling shoe salesman, Banks began his professional writing career with submissions to a regionally distributed trade journal.

He eventually found writing work in Chicago, wherein 1892 he married actress Carrie Wyatt Lounsbury.

There he mentored several young writers, who became known as the Davenport group, including Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, and Floyd Dell.

His close personal friend, noted attorney Clarence Darrow, delivered Banks' eulogy and served as executor of his estate.