A Gift of Wings

Editor’s note

When I wrote Richard Bach the letter that resulted in the publication of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I knew him very well, although I had never met him in person or spoken to him or written him before. I had read his first novel, Stranger to the Ground, and those 173 pages with him in a jet fighter plane over Europe told me enough to make me write, more than six years later, “I have a very special feeling that you could do a work of fiction that would somehow speak for the next few decades.…”

There is a lot about flying in this book, but much more about Richard Bach and his last fifteen years of seeking answers and finding some. For anyone who cares to know who he is, it is all here. The reminiscences and stories were arranged by the author for pace and enjoyment in reading; they are not in chronological order. For the reader who wants to place this life in sequence, the last pages of the book record the year each story was written.