Jonathan Livingston Seagull is an allegorical fable in novella form written by American author Richard Bach and illustrated with black-and-white photographs shot by Russell Munson.

In 2014, the book was reissued as Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The Complete Edition, which added a 17-page fourth part to the story.

In his old age, he is met by two radiantly-bright seagulls who share his abilities, explaining to him that he has learned much, but that they have come to take him "home" where he will go "higher".

One day, Chiang slowly transforms into a blindingly luminous being and, just before disappearing for the last time, he gives Jonathan one last tip: "keep working on love."

Jonathan ponders Chiang's words and, in a discussion with Sullivan, decides to go back to his own home planet, to teach his original Flock all that he has learned.

Returning there, he finds a fellow lover of flying, Fletcher Lynd Seagull, who is angry at recently being "Outcast" by the Flock.

Jonathan has now amassed a small group of Outcasts as flying students, with Fletcher the star pupil, and tells them that "each of us is in truth... an unlimited idea of freedom".

Jonathan's body suddenly begins to fade away, he requests that Fletcher stop others from thinking of him as anything silly like a god, and he gives a final piece of advice: "find out what you already know".

He passes on Jonathan's sentiments that seagulls are limitless ideas of freedom and their bodies nothing more than thought itself, but this only baffles the young gulls.

Bach reported that he was inspired to finish the fourth part of the novella by a near-death experience which had occurred in relation to a nearly fatal plane crash in August 2012.

Part Four focuses on the period several hundred years after Jonathan and his students have left the Flock, and their teachings become venerated rather than practised.

[citation needed] Bach, who said the book came to him as "a visionesque spooky thing", stopped after he wrote 10 pages and didn't pick it up again for a few years.

The book was a sleeper hit; the first edition in 1970 was only 3,000 copies and it would take two years before reaching number one on the New York Times Bestseller List.

[2] Macmillan failed to secure any advance publicity for Bach, but he personally took out two very small ads in The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly.

Mostly a word of mouth phenomenon, it entered the NYT Bestseller List on April 20, 1972, where it remained for 37 weeks, and by July 1972 it had 440,000 copies in print.

He becomes an extremely well-behaved accursed wanderer, then dies, and in posthumous fantasy sequences--though he is too wise really to question the fact of death, and too calmly confident to have doubts about his continuing upward mobility--he learns greater wisdom.

[10] In 1981, a French edition was published by Flammarion (Paris) featuring illustrations by photographer Jordi Olavarrieta, translated by Pierre Clostermann.

[21] The Irish actor Richard Harris won a Grammy in 1973 for the Audiobook LP Jonathan Livingston Seagull.