Richard Bach

Richard David Bach was born June 23, 1936, and began flying at 17, a hobby that became the metaphorical spine of nearly everything he wrote. Jonathan Livingston Seagull arrived in 1970 and became one of the decade's biggest sellers, followed by Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah in 1977, which did the same. His books were semi-autobiographical, using real or fictionalized events to argue that physical limits and death are illusion, not fact. He kept flying, and in late August 2012, on approach to Friday Harbor, Washington, his plane clipped power lines and crashed upside down in…