Bunch was born on August 7, 1925 on a farm outside Lowry City, Missouri. He graduated from Central Missouri State University with a Bachelor of Science degree, then received an Master's degree in English from Washington University in St. Louis. He finished all coursework for a Ph.D in English Literature at Washington University and the State University of Iowa, but rather than completing his doctoral dissertation, he changed course and studied for two years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop before dropping out.

Bunch worked extensively on farms in the Midwest, and took various low-level jobs in diverse industries. He later worked as a cartographer and map-chart editor for the Defense Mapping Agency in St. Louis until he retired in 1973 to pursue full-time freelance writing. He died of a heart attack on May 29, 2000.

Bunch married Phyllis Geraldine Flette and had two daughters, Phyllis Elaine and Velma Lorraine.

According to his long-time proponent Judith Merril, Bunch published over 200 stories and poems prior to his first mass-market SF sale, a short story called "Routine Emergency" in the December 1957 edition of If.

He published at least 100 stories in science fiction journals between 1957 and 1997, and nearly as many in mainstream literary magazines. No comprehensive David R. Bunch bibliography is known to exist; Bunch published almost exclusively in small-press journals, pulps and fanzines, which makes a complete tally difficult.

Much of Bunch's small notoriety comes from his inclusion in Harlan Ellison's defining New Wave anthology Dangerous Visions. Of the 32 writers selected, Bunch was the only one to have two stories included: Incident in Moderan and The Escaping. Although Dangerous Visions has been continually in print since 1967, no other Bunch material has seen print (including anthologies) since 1997.

His second collection of stories, Bunch!, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1993.

Throughout his career, Bunch worked on a group of satirical far-future SF stories set in Moderan, a version of Earth paved over entirely with gray plastic and controlled by perpetually warring cyborg fortresses. Although the society of Moderan seems to project an appearance of personal valor and military perfection, its citizens are ultimately powerless, dominated by their own petty insecurities and hubris.

46 of the Moderan stories were collected in the 1971 anthology Moderan, linked by a complex frame-story. The collection was never reprinted and has become a collector's item. Despite its relative rarity, it is frequently cited as an underrecognized classic and a founding work of cyberpunk.

Bunch continued to write, and publish, Moderan stories throughout his career. He had longed to see a complete collection of the Moderan sequence published, which has not yet taken place.

Collections

• Moderan, New York, Avon Books, 1971.
• Bunch!, Cambridge, Broken Mirrors Press, 1993. ISBN 1-880910-00-4

Poetry

• We Have a Nervous Job, 1983. Astoria, Oregon, Alba Press, 1983.
• The Heartacher and the Warehouseman, San Francisco, Anamnesis Press, 2000. ISBN 0-9631203-7-9