Richard Bach

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Richard David Bach
Born 23 June 1936 (1936-06-23) (age 72)
Oak Park, Illinois
Occupation Writer
Genres Fantasy, Philosophy

Richard David Bach (b. June 23, 1936, Oak Park, Illinois) is an American writer. He is widely known as the author of the hugely popular 1970s best-sellers Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions: The Adventures Of A Reluctant Messiah, and others. His books espouse his philosophy that our apparent physical limits and mortality are merely appearance. He claims to be a direct descendant of Johann Sebastian Bach. He is noted for his love of flying and for his books related to air flight and flying in a metaphorical context. He has pursued flying as a hobby since the age of 17.

Contents

[edit] Life and work

Richard Bach attended Long Beach State College in 1955. He has authored numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970), Illusions (1977), One (1989), and Out of My Mind (1999). Most of his books have been semi-autobiographical, using actual or fictionalized events from his life to illustrate his philosophy.

He served in the Navy Reserve, then later in the United States Air Force (USAF) as a jet pilot. Afterwards, he worked a variety of jobs, including technical writer for Douglas Aircraft and contributing editor for Flying magazine. He served in the USAF reserve deployed in France in 1960. He later became a barnstormer. Most of his books involve flight in some way, from the early stories which are straightforwardly about flying aircraft, to Stranger to the Ground, his first book, to his later works, in which he used flight as a philosophical metaphor.

In 1970, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a story about a seagull who flew for the love of flying rather than merely to catch food, was published by Macmillan Publishers after the manuscript was turned down by many other publishers. The book, which included unique photos of seagulls in flight by photographer Russell Munson, became a number-one bestseller on both the fiction and non-fiction lists.[citation needed] The book contained fewer than 10,000 words, yet it broke all hardcover sales records since Gone with the Wind. It sold more than 1,000,000 copies in 1972 alone.[1]The surprise success of the book was widely reported in the media in the early 1970s.[2]

In 1973, the book was turned into a movie, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, produced by Paramount Pictures Corporation. The movie included a soundtrack by Neil Diamond.

A second book, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, published in 1977, tells the story of the author's encounter with a modern-day messiah who has decided to quit.

Bach has retained a dedicated fan base throughout the years.[3] During the 1990s, Bach appeared online at Compuserve, where he answered e-mails personally. Bach was interviewed in April, 2005 on Conscious Talk Radio, and this interview was replayed a few times in 2006. Click here to download it.

Bach had six children with his first wife, Bette. Bette typed and edited most of Richard's aviation writings. They divorced in 1970, because Richard didn't believe in marriage. Bette Bach Fineman, who remarried, is also a pilot, and the author of Patterns, about her life as a pilot and single mother. His son, Jonathan, is a software engineer and journalist, who wrote Above the Clouds about growing up without knowing his father, Richard; and then later meeting him as a college student. (Richard gave his approval; although he noted that it included some personal history he'd "rather not see in print").[4] Other children are Robert, a commercial airline pilot; Kristel; James, a computer expert and writer; and Erika. His youngest daughter, Bethany, was killed in an accident at the age of fifteen in 1985.

In 1977 Bach married actress Leslie Parrish whom he met during the making of the Jonathan Livingston Seagull movie.[5] She was a major element in two of his subsequent books—The Bridge Across Forever and One—which primarily focused on their relationship and Bach's concept of soulmates. They divorced in 1999. Bach was married to his third wife, Sabryna Nelson-Alexopoulos in April 1999.

A little-known fact is that Richard Bach, a fan of the original Star Trek television series, also wrote a script for the unproduced Star Trek Phase II television series that was to be produced in the mid-1970s. It was entitled "Practice in Waking" (Episode #4). According to Harold Livingston, producer of the Phase II project, his script was one of the most popular story ideas among the Star Trek Phase II crew. They felt that Richard Bach would add a certain amount of class to the series and pave the way for new directions."[6]

[edit] Philosophy

Bach espouses a consistent philosophy in his books: Our true nature is not bound by space or time, we are expressions of the Is (see: Non-duality), we are not truly born nor truly die, and we enter this world of Seems and Appearances for fun, learning, to share experiences with those we care for, to explore—and most of all to learn how to love and love again.[citation needed]

[edit] Books

The book Curious Lives is in fact the above five Ferret Chronicles books collected in one volume, the only changes being changes to the titles of each of the five.

  • Flying: The Aviation Trilogy (2003) Scribner, ISBN 0-7432-4747-7, Collected edition containing
    • Stranger to the Ground
    • Biplane
    • Nothing by Chance
  • Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul (2004), ISBN 1-57174-421-5

[edit] References

  1. ^ "20th-Century American Bestsellers". http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/courses/bestsellers/search.cgi?title=Jonathan+Livingston+Seagull. Retrieved on 2006-09-09. 
  2. ^ Walters, Raymond, Jr., New York Times Book Review, July 23, 1972, 43
  3. ^ The Christian Science Monitor (archive August 10, 2000) Accessed September 09, 2006
  4. ^ Bach, Jonathan, "Above the Clouds: A Reunion of Father and Son," (1993) ISBN 0-688-11760-0
  5. ^ "Leslie Parrish (I) Biography". http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0663562/bio. Retrieved on 2007-03-13. 
  6. ^ Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, "Captains' Logs - The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages," (1995) ISBN 0-316-32957-6

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Richard Bach
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