A Nurse's Story (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Peter Baida was born on July 26, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland. After receiving degrees from Harvard College (B.A., magna cum laude, 1972) and Boston University (M.A., 1973), he completed an M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. Upon graduation he began a lifelong affiliation with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where he took on diverse responsibilities, culminating with an extended and successful tenure as the center's director of direct mail fundraising from 1984 through 1999.

Since Baida established himself within the financial and business communities of New York, it is perhaps not surprising that his first book-length project was on business. His Poor Richard's Legacy: American Business Values from Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump, published in 1990, was immediately well received as an entertaining social history that explored the personalities and business acumen of entrepreneurs and also showed the spirit of the country as it was captured in self-help books of the day as well as in the critical writings of such critics as Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), and Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006).

Complementing Baida's success in the business world and in writing about the affairs and personalities associated with the wealth of the nation were the short stories that he submitted to a number of prominent U.S. literary magazines. In 1998, the Gettysburg Review published "A Nurse's Story," a story that blends the worlds of business and of illness, both of which were familiar to Baida, given his work experience and that fact that he was a hemophiliac. The story was a critical success and garnered a first prize in the 1999 O. Henry Short Story Awards. It was reprinted as part of the annual O. Henry Prize anthology and again in 2001 as the title story of Baida's first and only collection of short fiction.

Baida died of liver failure and post-surgical complications on December 10, 1999, within months of receiving his O. Henry Award.