Robert Bausch, "an acclaimed Virginia teacher and writer whose nine novels won praise for their subtle blending of humor with ominous threads of violence and family fault lines," died October 9, the Washington Post reported. He was 73. Bausch "spent most of his career teaching in Northern Virginia and, for a time, even shared an office at George Mason University with his brother" and fellow novelist, Richard.
As a writer, Robert Bausch "defied easy classification: His novels and short stories were sometimes set in historical times and sometimes in the recent past; they could be starkly realistic or veer into fantasy; they could be comic, violent and tragic, seemingly at once," the Post noted.
His books include On the Way Home (1982), Almighty Me (1991), A Hole in the Earth (2000), The Gypsy Man (2002), Out of Season (2005), Far as the Eye Can See (2014), and In the Fall They Come Back (2017).
Bausch received a statewide award in 2013 as one of Virginia's leading college professors, and in 2009 he was honored with the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature from Longwood University for his body of work.