John Blackburn presented this master's thesis to the faculty of the University of Virginia.

The Sam Shepard Web Site
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/theatre_dance/Shepard/

This site is a haven for all things Shepard. It includes links to current productions, reviews, texts, and other resources of interest to both the casual playgoer and the scholar. You will also find a separate page for "True West on Broadway."

Sam Shepard
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~art/shepard.html

Harvard's American Repertory Theatre biography of the playwright.

BIOGRAPHY
Samuel Shepard Rogers VII was born in Illinois in 1943 and is one of America's most important playwrights. He has won numerous awards, including ten Obie Awards (given to off-Broadway plays) between 1966 and 1979, an Obie Award for sustained achievement in 1980, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for A Lie of the Mind in 1985, and a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child in 1979. His work has been produced primarily in the experimental theater of downtown New York in places such as La Mama and in regional theaters throughout the United States known for artistic integrity but not for reaching a broad spectrum of theatergoers. In his way Shepard has been an underground playwright who has won the respect of most theater people, including the best playwrights.

When his father began to drink and family life became intolerable, Shepard left home after a year at college and toured with the Bishops Company Repertory Players. At nineteen he wound up in New York working in one of the best jazz clubs of the day, the Village Gate. During this time in Greenwich Village he began to write one-act plays with extraordinary energy. Like Jack Kerouac, he almost never revised his work. He wrote it in a burst of energy and then had it performed to audiences whose admiration grew.

In the 1970s Shepard began acting in major motion pictures. One of the ironies of his life is that he became a matinee idol after appearing in movies such as The Right Stuff, Fool for Love, Country, and Crimes of the Heart. His output for the stage had been prodigious, with dozens of one-act plays, and he has a central body of work that has gained him an enviable reputation. Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and Buried Child (1978) both helped solidify Shepard's reputation. Suicide in B-flat (1976) and True West (1980) only made it clearer that his work was developing in a consistent vein of black humor and dark criticism of the sanctity of family life. Incest—or potential incest—is also a theme in Fool for Love (1983), in which Shepard starred on film. The play is set in the West and contains all the themes for which his work is known.

Shepard began his work with a sense of the West drawn from popular literature, reshaped it, and produced it in a new form. If the American West has a reality that survived its mythicization in the dime novel and John Wayne's movies, then Shepard is partly responsible for the way we now see it.