Jonathan Livingston Seagull Jonathan Livingston Seagull Jonathan Livingston Seagull, written by Richard Bach and illustrated by Russell Munson, is a fable in novella form about a seagull who is trying to learn about life and flight, and a homily about self-perfection. Bach wrote it as a series of short stories that were published in "Flying" magazine in the late 1960s. It was first published in book form in 1970, and by the end of 1972 over a million copies were in print. "Reader's Digest" published a condensed version, and the book reached the top of the "New York Times" Best Seller list, where
Richard Bach to the Ground (1963) described the deployment to France of his Air National Guard unit, and was well reviewed, for example by Edmund Fuller in the Wall Street Journal. 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 several others. It had been first published, free, in SOARING, the monthly magazine of the Soaring Society of America. The book, which included photos of seagulls in flight by photographer Russell Munson, became a number-one bestseller.