A short life of the author
Samuel Shepard Rogers III (1943–2017) was born on 5 November 1943 at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. His father was an Army officer and bomber pilot who became an alcoholic after the war; his mother was a teacher. The family moved constantly — California, South Dakota, Utah, Illinois — and his father’s violence and disintegration became the raw material of his work. He left home at nineteen, moved to New York, and joined the off-off-Broadway theatre scene in the East Village, where he began writing plays at a furious pace.
Life and Career
By the age of twenty-five, Shepard had written more than a dozen one-act plays — Cowboys, The Rock Garden, Icarus’s Mother, La Turista — for venues like the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and Theatre Genesis. These early plays were wild, surreal, and jazz-inflected, drawing on rock music, drugs, and the mythic American landscape.
The Tooth of Crime (1972) was his first major work: a play structured as a contest between two rock-and-roll gunfighters, written in a hallucinatory argot that mixed slang, music criticism, and Old West vocabulary.
The family plays followed and became his enduring legacy. Curse of the Starving Class (1978), Buried Child (1978, Pulitzer Prize), True West (1980), and A Lie of the Mind (1985) are dark, violent, mythic dramas about American families ripping themselves apart — fathers destroying sons, brothers at each other’s throats, mothers retreating into denial. They are the most important American family plays since Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
Shepard was simultaneously a film actor — his role as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983) earned him an Academy Award nomination — and a cultural icon. His relationship with Jessica Lange lasted nearly thirty years. He wrote Paris, Texas (1984) with Wim Wenders. His prose — Motel Chronicles (1982), Cruising Paradise (1996), Great Dream of Heaven (2002), Spy of the First Person (2017, written while dying of ALS) — has a spare, poetic quality.
He died on 27 July 2017 at his home in Kentucky.
Major Works and Themes
Shepard’s great subject is the American family as a site of violence, betrayal, and failed mythmaking. His West is not the frontier of optimism but a landscape of wreckage — abandoned farms, dying fathers, sons who cannot escape their inheritance.
Buried Child (1978) — in which a family’s buried secret literally resurfaces from the ground — is his masterwork.
True West (1980) — two brothers, one a Hollywood screenwriter and the other a drifter, who gradually exchange identities — is his most commercially performed play.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Shepard is recognised as the most important American playwright of the late twentieth century. His influence on subsequent American drama — from Tracy Letts to Annie Baker — is deep and direct.
Key Works
- The Tooth of Crime (1972)
- Curse of the Starving Class (1978)
- Buried Child (1978)
- True West (1980)
- Fool for Love (1983)
- A Lie of the Mind (1985)
- Cruising Paradise (1996)
- Great Dream of Heaven (2002)
- Spy of the First Person (2017)
Collecting Shepard
Sam Shepard first editions are collected by enthusiasts of American drama and literary fiction.
Early play scripts published by small presses (Bobbs-Merrill, City Lights) in the 1960s and 1970s are rare and valuable.
Buried Child (1979, Urizen Books) and True West (various editions) are sought at $75–$300.
Cruising Paradise (1996, Knopf) and Great Dream of Heaven (2002, Knopf) are available at $30–$100 for fine first editions.
Spy of the First Person (2017, Knopf) — his final work, written while dying — is collectible at $30–$75.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buried Child Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play — a prodigal-son return to a decaying Midwestern farm family concealing an infanticide — combining Gothic horror with naturalistic family drama to produce the definitive theatrical statement on the American family as a system of secrets, violence, and complicity, where the buried past literally erupts from the earth in the final act. | 1979 | Urizen Books | English |
| Curse of the Starving Class The first of Shepard's family plays — set on a failing California avocado ranch — follows the Tate family as the drunken father tries to sell the property, the mother plans her own escape, the son fills the refrigerator compulsively, and the daughter flees to Mexico, exploring hunger (literal and metaphorical) and the curse of heredity that passes dysfunction from generation to generation. | 1976 | Bobbs-Merrill | English |
| La Turista Shepard's first full-length published play — an American couple sick in a Mexican hotel room in Act One, sick in a American hotel room in Act Two — combining Artaud's theater of cruelty with countercultural energy and verbal pyrotechnics to announce a new voice in American theater: savage, funny, and operating by a dream-logic that refuses linear narrative. | 1968 | Bobbs-Merrill | English |
| The Tooth of Crime Shepard's most experimental major play — a rock-and-roll Western in which aging star Hoss defends his territory against the young challenger Crow in a series of language duels — combining the structures of Jacobean revenge tragedy with the idioms of rock music, street slang, and gangster movies to produce the definitive theatrical statement on American culture as competition and performance. | 1974 | Grove Press | English |
| True West Two brothers — a screenwriter and a petty thief — meet in their mother's suburban kitchen and gradually exchange identities, the civilized brother becoming savage and the savage becoming domestic, in Shepard's most commercially successful play and his most focused exploration of American masculinity as a performance that can be put on or taken off like a costume. | 1981 | Doubleday | English |