Richard Bach

Richard Bach was born in the 1936 in Oak Park, Illinois. After his first airplane trip at the age of fifteen, Bach’s life was forever changed, and he became obsessed with the freeing phenomenon of flight. As a young man, Bach served in the United States Navy and the National Guard as a fighter pilot. After his time in the service, he continued working as a writer and editor for flight-centric publications and aircraft companies. In 1970, Bach’s life changed again when he sold the manuscript for a novel called Jonathan Livingston Seagull to Macmillan Publishers. The book became a bestseller, and sold over a million copies in the year 1972 alone. Bach’s further writing explored themes he touched on in Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and in 1977, he published a book called Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. In 2012, Bach was involved in an accident while landing his aircraft—the near-death experience and his subsequent four-month hospitalization inspired him to retool the unfinished fourth part of his first book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and the new “complete” edition was published in 2013. Bach also wrote a sequel to Illusions in the wake of his accident, and the new book incorporated stories from his recovery. As a writer, Bach’s work primarily focuses on the freedom of flight and the joys of spiritualism, and his real-life experiences frequently find their way into his novels in one way or another.