 Richard Bach's first book, the autobiographical "Stranger to the Ground" (1963) described the deployment to France of his Air National Guard unit, and was received favorably, 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 released by Macmillan Publishers after the manuscript was turned down by several others.It had first been published in "Soaring", the magazine of the Soaring Society of America.