Bahr, who served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War and then worked for several years on the railroads, enrolled at the University of Mississippi in the early 1970s when he was in his late 20s.
from Ole Miss and served as the curator of the William Faulkner house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, for nearly twenty years.
Bahr began his writing career in the 1970s, writing both fiction and non-fiction articles that appeared in publications such as Southern Living, Civil War Times Illustrated, as well as the short-lived regional publication, Lagniappe (1974–75) which he and Franklin Walker co-edited.
In The Judas Field, Bahr again returns to the Battle of Franklin theme, but this time it is through the eyes of one of its participants, again from Cumberland, who travels back to the battlefield in the 1880s to recover the body of one of the fallen, and, in doing so, relives the horror of that fateful day in 1864.
It is named for its Christmas 1940 setting on "207 miles of ballasted heavyweight main line rail between Meridian, Mississippi, and New Orleans."