Richard Bach

Before his books found millions of readers, Richard David Bach found the sky. Born on June 23, 1936, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Roland R. Bach, an American Red Cross chapter manager, and Ruth Shaw Bach, he grew up with a fascination that became the organizing force of his life. His first airplane flight came at 14, when his mother was campaigning for a seat on the council in Long Beach, California. Her campaign manager, Paul Marcus, happened to fly airplanes and invited the young Bach up in his Globe Swift. By 17, Bach was flying as a hobby, and that early lift into the air would shape nearly everything he later wrote.

Bach graduated from California State University, Long Beach in 1955, then served in the United States Navy Reserve and in the New Jersey Air National Guard’s 108th Fighter Wing, 141st Fighter Squadron, as a Republic F-84F Thunderstreak fighter pilot. He also served in the USAF reserve and was deployed in France in 1960. His working life stayed close to aviation: he wrote technical material for Douglas Aircraft, served as a contributing editor for Flying magazine, and later became a barnstormer. In the summer of 1970, he and his friend Chris Cagle traveled to Ireland to fly World War I aircraft for Roger Corman’s film Von Richthofen and Brown.

His first book, Stranger to the Ground, appeared in 1963 and described a mission flight from Wethersfield, England, to Chaumont, France. It was the strongest seller among his first three books by 1972, but Bach’s wider fame came with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, published in 1970. The brief story of a seagull who flies for love and passion, rather than merely to catch food, had been turned down by several publishers before Macmillan released it. With fewer than 10,000 words and photographs of seagulls in flight by Russell Munson, it became a number-one bestseller, selling more than one million copies in 1972 alone.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull was adapted into a 1973 Paramount Pictures film with a soundtrack by Neil Diamond, though Bach later sued producer and director Hall Bartlett over the screenplay and approval of the final release. The film reached theaters with changes, and Bach had his name removed from the screenwriting credits. In 1975, he was the driving force behind Nothing by Chance, a documentary based on his book of the same name, gathering pilot friends to recreate modern barnstorming across the United States. Two years later, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah became another of the 1970s’ biggest sellers.

Much of Bach’s writing is semi-autobiographical, drawing on real or fictionalized moments from his life to express his belief that physical limits and mortality are only appearances. That idea was tested sharply on August 31, 2012, when he was badly injured while landing his aircraft, nicknamed Puff, on San Juan Island in Washington. The landing gear clipped power lines, and the plane crashed upside down in a field near Friday Harbor. Bach spent four months hospitalized, and he later said the near-death experience inspired him to finish the fourth part of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Travels with Puff was released in 2013, and Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student, published in 2014, incorporated the crash and his medical recovery.

Bach’s personal life also entered the public record. He had six children with his first wife, Bette Jeanne Franks, herself a pilot and author of Patterns: Tales of Flying and of Life; she typed and edited much of his aviation writing. They divorced in 1970. Their son Jonathan later wrote Above the Clouds about growing up without knowing his father and meeting him as a college student. In 1981, Bach married actress Leslie Parrish, whom he had met during the making of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Readers continue to turn to Bach because his sentences make freedom feel practical and demanding at once, as in his plain reminder: “Life does not listen to your logic; it goes on its own way, undisturbed. You have to listen to life.”