The Rise and Fall of Albert Bierstadt: Art-Priest of the West (Revised), 117,000 words

This is the true story of Bierstadt's dramatic if not frantic and tragic life. He was the best known American landscape artist in the mid-1800s. Like many other artists of the Hudson River School (1840-1880) he did not commit to art until age 23. Then, in one decade, he became a top notch artist, studying at the artist's club in Dusseldorf, Germany, toured Europe, returned to become #1 artist in NYC, married his best friend's wife, and sold six-foot by ten-foot paintings for up to $30,000 each. (Close to $400,000 in today's terms)

The following decade, the gods deserted him. He cascaded downward until he died at age 72 in 1902. During his fall, he created a font-page scandal in NYC newspapers, lost his reputation and his income, then lost his mansion to fire that included hundreds of his paintings and a life's worth of western and Indian paraphernalia. Lastly, he lost his wife, the woman he loved intensely, to tuberculosis. It took her 17 years to die.

Sixty years after his death his major paintings recognized, reevaluated, and are now in more than 100 museums in America and in museums throughout Europe.