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Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard's outlandish, nightmarish, yet lyrical plays— The Tooth of Crime, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind, and dozens of others—have garnered him a Pulitzer Prize and a lasting reputation as one of America's greatest living playwrights. His charismatic performances in movies like Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff, Country, and Thunderheart —as well as his screenplay for Paris, Texas —have made him an indelible presence in American film. Rock 'n' roller, rancher, and rodeo prizewinner, he has toured with Bob Dylan, hung out with the Rolling Stones, collaborated with Patti Smith, and raised a family with Jessica Lange. Yet throughout he has remained an enigmatic figure. In this acclaimed biography, now fully updated, Don Shewey explores the life and works of this American visionary, illuminating Shepard's unique success in straddling the divide between serious artist and pop-culture hero.
282 pages, Paperback
First published March 21, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 4, 2023
Writing biography is difficult. It’s more difficult when your subject is still alive, and it attains a third level of difficulty when neither he nor most of his friends and colleagues will talk to you. Yet Don Shewey, who for decades now has been one of our most astute theater critics, has gotten as close to plumbing the mysteries and secrets of Sam Shepard as anyone outside of the late playwright’s immediate circle (Shepard died in 2017).
Shewey was commissioned in the mid-80s by the mass market publisher Dell to write a biography to capitalize, it seems, on Shepard’s surprising movie stardom (Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff, Country, etc.). He covered that, of course, but put the emphasis where it belonged: on the Shepard who, more than a decade previously, emerged as one of America’s few incontestably major playwrights. He updated the book a decade later and in doing so, the book, he writes, transformed from “a classic rags-to-riches success story,” to a richer, more complicated “chronicle of a life,” replete with ups and downs, successes and failures, critical misunderstanding, and then mainstream acclaim.
With the lack of assistance from the deeply private Shepard, et al., Shewey relies on interviews from those willing to talk to him and on the feature stories and published interviews that Shepard did give, and from these he creates a convincing, coherent narrative of Shepard’s life. The “true” Shepard, however, resides in his plays, and it’s in his discussions of them that Shewey, not surprisingly, really shines. He follows the emergence of Shepard’s recurrent themes and tropes (the warring personalities within an individual; the struggle for domination between generations, be they father and son or established and upstart rock stars; “the inescapability of the family bond”) but also identifies new ones that appear later, as in 1985’s A Lie of the Mind: “It’s a mediation on loss and the tricks it plays on the human psyche, making a grieving survivor feel responsible for a loved death or turning emotional crimes into physical ones.”
Concerning that play, Shewey writes, “Both biography and art involve the process of constructing narrative from life’s vast database, converting prosaic details into poetry through selection, shaping, speculation.” He’s not talking about his own work in this book, but he could be. In a manner that is unlike the rest of his large body of criticism, Shewey writes Sam Shepard in an informal, loping vernacular that often echoes Shepard’s. Describing Shepard’s ability in Buried Child to evoke the same emotions and tensions felt by the characters in an audience, he writes that the play “becomes the things it is about.” In many moments, Shewey comes close to achieving the same thing. In a literary sense, that's about as faithful a portrait as a biographer can attain.
Shewey was commissioned in the mid-80s by the mass market publisher Dell to write a biography to capitalize, it seems, on Shepard’s surprising movie stardom (Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff, Country, etc.). He covered that, of course, but put the emphasis where it belonged: on the Shepard who, more than a decade previously, emerged as one of America’s few incontestably major playwrights. He updated the book a decade later and in doing so, the book, he writes, transformed from “a classic rags-to-riches success story,” to a richer, more complicated “chronicle of a life,” replete with ups and downs, successes and failures, critical misunderstanding, and then mainstream acclaim.
With the lack of assistance from the deeply private Shepard, et al., Shewey relies on interviews from those willing to talk to him and on the feature stories and published interviews that Shepard did give, and from these he creates a convincing, coherent narrative of Shepard’s life. The “true” Shepard, however, resides in his plays, and it’s in his discussions of them that Shewey, not surprisingly, really shines. He follows the emergence of Shepard’s recurrent themes and tropes (the warring personalities within an individual; the struggle for domination between generations, be they father and son or established and upstart rock stars; “the inescapability of the family bond”) but also identifies new ones that appear later, as in 1985’s A Lie of the Mind: “It’s a mediation on loss and the tricks it plays on the human psyche, making a grieving survivor feel responsible for a loved death or turning emotional crimes into physical ones.”
Concerning that play, Shewey writes, “Both biography and art involve the process of constructing narrative from life’s vast database, converting prosaic details into poetry through selection, shaping, speculation.” He’s not talking about his own work in this book, but he could be. In a manner that is unlike the rest of his large body of criticism, Shewey writes Sam Shepard in an informal, loping vernacular that often echoes Shepard’s. Describing Shepard’s ability in Buried Child to evoke the same emotions and tensions felt by the characters in an audience, he writes that the play “becomes the things it is about.” In many moments, Shewey comes close to achieving the same thing. In a literary sense, that's about as faithful a portrait as a biographer can attain.
August 21, 2020
The best biography on Shepard's life and work I have read! It feels really accessible and isnt too academically focused.
I love how Shewey links what was going on in Shepard's life at the time to how it influenced his work.
However it is a little dated and I wish we could have an updated version about all the work he had done in his later career after publication.
I love how Shewey links what was going on in Shepard's life at the time to how it influenced his work.
However it is a little dated and I wish we could have an updated version about all the work he had done in his later career after publication.
July 17, 2014
A solid, informative biography
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews