Robert Bausch Books in Order

If you want a strong place to start: A Hole in the Earth → Out of Season
If you want something stranger and more inventive: The Lives of Riley Chance → Almighty Me
If you want suspense with a small-town feel: The Gypsy Man
If you want historical fiction: Far as the Eye Can See
If you want a school-set moral drama: In the Fall They Come Back

Robert Bausch was born at Fort Benning, Georgia, on April 18, 1945, and grew up in the Washington, D.C., area. He came from a big Catholic family and had an identical twin, the novelist Richard Bausch, which gave his life an unusual mirror from the start. People sometimes mixed the brothers up, and for a time they even shared office space.

Before he settled into a long teaching career, Bausch took the scenic route. He served in the Air Force from 1965 to 1969, teaching survival tactics, and over the years worked as a cabdriver, a laundromat worker, a library assistant, and a salesman of everything from vacuum cleaners to cars. He studied at George Mason University, earning a BA, an MA, and later an MFA.

He was writing the whole time.

Bausch said he had been a writer all his life, but like a lot of writers, he built the work around jobs, classes, and family. He taught at a private prep school and then spent most of his career at Northern Virginia Community College, starting in 1975. He also taught at George Mason, American University, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia, and later led workshops from his Virginia home.

His first novel, On the Way Home, came out in 1982 and showed one of his lasting interests right away: what war, grief, and silence do to a family. Two years later, The Lives of Riley Chance took a stranger turn, following a boy who seems to remember earlier lives. Then Almighty Me asked what would happen if an ordinary car salesman got God's powers for a year. The premise is funny. The book is funnier, sadder, and more human than that summary sounds.

He liked big ideas, but he kept bringing them back to kitchens, bedrooms, classrooms, and cars.

That helps explain why A Hole in the Earth hit so hard for many readers. Its narrator, Henry Porter, is a history teacher, gambler, and failing father who keeps making the next wrong choice and still never stops feeling painfully real. Bausch followed it with The Gypsy Man, set in a Virginia mountain town full of rumor and fear, and later Out of Season, a mournful family novel set in a worn Maryland resort town. Even when the plots grew darker, his attention stayed on ordinary people trying, and often failing, to love each other well.

He could shift settings without losing his center. Far as the Eye Can See moves into the post-Civil War West and follows Bobby Hale across a violent frontier, while In the Fall They Come Back returns to Northern Virginia for a close look at an idealistic young teacher whose urge to help turns dangerous. The range is real, from fantasy to school novel to historical fiction, but the pull is similar across the books: damaged people, hard moral choices, and families, or makeshift families, trying to hold together.

Bausch also published the story collection The White Rooster and Other Stories, which won a major literary prize in 1995. Later honors included the Fellowship of Southern Writers' Hillsdale Award for Fiction and the John Dos Passos Prize. Those facts matter, but what probably matters more to readers is the feeling his work leaves behind. He could be bleak, but he was rarely cold.

In his later years he lived in Virginia with his wife Denise Natt Bausch, kept teaching, and kept writing. He died in Fredericksburg on October 9, 2018. The books are still a good way in, especially if you like fiction that can be funny, rough, tender, and a little bruised all at once.