Melissa Susan Bank

About

American author known for writing books of short stories such as The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. She taught at Stony Brook University and was the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction. She died in August of 2022.

Before Fame

She graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1982. She moved to New York and started work in publishing before getting her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Cornell University in 1987.

Trivia

It took her 12 years to finish writing her first novel, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, mostly due to the head injury she sustained when she was struck by a car while riding her bicycle in 1994. She struggled with short-term memory loss for two years.

Family Life

She was born in Boston and raised in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park. Her father was a neurologist who died during his late fifties of leukemia, a condition he concealed for almost ten years. Her mother worked as a teacher. 

Associated With

When Hunting and Fishing came out, critics compared her to Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and John Cheever.