December 17, 2011 (Texas) – JoSara MeDia is proud to announce the availability of the paperback version of A Barren Landscape: In Search of an American Culture, 1811 – 1861; A Memoir of Eliza Rupp by Geraldine Smith Priest. Hardback and eBook versions will be available soon. The story describes the time in America before the Civil War. America in the early 1800s was a cultural blank canvas, a barren landscape awaiting texture in the form of learning, literature and the arts. Geraldine Priest creates this fictional historical memoir of Eliza Rupp, the embodiment of the many Americans striving to fill that void. The story of Eliza’s family and her study of piano are interwoven with those of the leading literati, artists and educators of the day. Like so many of them, she journeys to Europe to further her studies and make her own cultural contribution to America’s Barren Landscape. The genesis of the story is told excellently by Jerry in her Foreword: From a lifelong love of history, music and the arts began to grow some years ago a vague but nagging feeling that I needed somehow to pull these things together. I had not a clue as to how to go about it until I came across a paragraph in Henry James’ biography of Hawthorne which struck me like a lightning bolt and became the starting point as well as the pervasive theme of this book. In a backward glance at a simpler time, when our New World seemed so full of promise, when our stresses were more limited in scope, and with an innate affinity for the beginnings of things, I have told this story of one family’s struggle with what Henry James describes as a time of “a great desire for culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in aesthetics, together with a very scanty supply of the materials for such pursuits. Small things were made to do large service.” Many, like James, found the American cultural landscape too bleak and spent their creative lives in Europe. To others, like Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Bulfinch, we are grateful for a culture of our own. Read more…