PAL: Perspectives in American Literature:
A Research and Reference Guide

| Top | Primary Works

Five plays: Chicago, Icarus's mother, Red cross, Fourteen hundred thousand, Melodrama play. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967. PS3569 .H394 F5

Operation sidewinder; a play in two acts. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970. PS3569.H394 O6

The unseen hand and other plays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill: 1972. PS3569 H394 U5

Mad dog blues & other plays. NY: Winter House 1972. PS3569 H394 A6

The tooth of crime; and, Geography of a horse dreamer: two plays. London: Faber, 1974. PS3569 H394 T6

Curse of the starving class: a play in three acts. NY: Dramatists Play Service, 1976. PS3569 .H394 C87

Angel City & other plays. NY: Urizen Books, 1976. PS3569 H394 A8

Seduced: a play in two acts. NY: Dramatists Play Service, 1979. PS3569 .H394 S43x

Buried child, & Seduced, & Suicide in B. NY: Urizen Books, 1979. PS3569.H394 B8

True west. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981. PS3569 .H394 T75

Seven plays. NY: Bantam Books, 1981. PS3569 .H394 A6

Hawk moon: a book of short stories, poems and monologues. NY: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981. PS3569.H394 H3

Motel chronicles. with photographs by Johnny Dark. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982. PS3569 .H394 M6

Fool for love. And The sad lament of Pecos Bill on the eve of killing his wife. words by Sam Shepard; music by Sam Shepard & Catherine Stone. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1983. PS3569 .H394 A6

A lie of the mind: a play in three acts The war in heaven: angel's monologue. by Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard. NY: New American Library, 1987. PS3569 .H394 L5

Joseph Chaikin & Sam Shepard: letters and texts, 1972-1984. edited by Barry V. Daniels. NY: New American Library, 1989. PS 3569 .H394 Z486

Simpatico. NY: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1995. PS3569 .H394 S56

| Top | Selected Bibliography: Books

Auerbach, Doris. Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway theater. Boston: Twayne, 1982. PS351 .A9

Bottoms, Stephen J. The Theatre of Sam Shepard. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1998.

DeRose, David J. Sam Shepard. NY: Twayne, 1992. PS3569 .H394 Z67

Hall, Ann C. 'A Kind of Alaska': Women in the Plays of O'Neill, Pinter, and Shepard. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.

Hart, Lynda. Sam Shepard's metaphorical stages. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1987. PS3569 .H394 Z69

Malkin, Jeanette R. Memory Theater and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1999.

Marranca, Bonnie. ed. American dreams: the imagination of Sam Shepard. NY: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1981. PS3569 .H394 Z56

McDonough, Carla J. Staging masculinity: male identity in contemporary American drama. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1997. PS338 .M46 M33

McGhee, Jim. True Lies: The Architecture of the Fantastic in the Plays of Sam Shepard. NY: Peter Lang, 1993.

Patraka, Vivian, and Mark Siegel. Sam Shepard. Boise, Idaho: Boise SU, 1985. PS3569 .H394 Z8

Tucker, Martin. Sam Shepard. NY: Continuum, 1992. PS3569 .H394 Z92

Wade, Leslie A. Sam Shepard and the American theatre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1997. PS3569 .H394 Z97

Wilcox, Leonard. ed. Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard. NY: St. Martin's, 1993.

| Top | Selected Bibliography: Articles

Abbott, Michael, "The Curse of the Misbegotten: The Wanton Son in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill and Sam Shepard." Eugene O'Neill Review 18.1-2 (Sprg 1994): 193-98.

Bassan, Maurice. "The 'True West' of Sam Shepard and Stephen Crane." American Literary Realism 28.2 (Wint 1996): 11-17.

Bigsby, C. W. E. "Blood and Bones yet Dressed in Poetry: The Drama of Sam Shepard." Contemporary Theatre Review 8.3 (1998): 19-30.

Brater, Enoch. "American Clocks: Sam Shepard's Time Plays." Contemporary Theatre Review 8.4 (1998): 19-28.

Burkman, Katherine H. "The Myth of Narcissus: Shepard's True West and Mamet's Speed-the-Plow." Hollywood on Stage: Playwrights Evaluate the Culture Industry. Ed Kimball King. NY: Garland, 1997. 113-23.

Busby, Mark. "Sam Shepard and Frontier Gothic." Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature. Eds. D. Mogen, S. Sanders, and J. Karpinski. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1993. 84-93.

Callens, Johan. "Sam Shepard's Inter/National Stage." Staging Difference: Cultural Pluralism in American Theatre and Drama. Ed. M. Maufort. NY: Peter Lang, 1995. 157-71.

- - -. "Diverting the Integrated Spectacle of War: Sam Shepard's States of Shock." Text and Performance Quarterly 20.3 (Jul 2000): 290-306.

Demastes, William W. "Understanding Sam Shepard's Realism." Comparative Drama 21.3 (Fall 1987): 229-48. Fall, 21:3, 229-48 

Garner, Stanton B., Jr. "Staging 'Things': Realism and the Theatrical Object in Shepard's Theatre." Contemporary Theatre Review 8.3 (1998): 55-66.

Harris-Smith, Susan. "Trying to Like Sam Shepard: Or, the Emperor's New Dungarees." Contemporary Theatre Review 8.3 (1998): 31-40.

Hayes, Michael J. "Sam Shepard." American Drama. Ed. Clive Bloom. NY: St. Martin's, 1995. 131-41.

Holstein, Suzy C. "'All Growed Up' in the True West, or Huck and Tom Meet Sam Shepard." Western American Literature 29.1 (Sprg 1994): 41-50.

| Top | Howard, Patricia. ed. "Sam Shepard and Contemporary American Drama." Modern Drama 36.1 (1993): 1-177. Special Edition

Grant, Gary. "Shifting the Paradigm: Shepard, Myth, and the Transformation of Consciousness." Modern Drama 36.1 (1993): 120-30.

Hoeper, Jeffrey D. "Cain, Canaanites, and Philistines in Sam Shepard's True West." Modern Drama 36.1 (1993): 76-82.

Lanier, Gregory W. "The Killer's Ancient Mask: Unity and Dualism in Shepard's The Tooth of Crime." Modern Drama 36.1 (1993): 48-60.

Schvey, Henry I. "A Worm in the Wood: The Father-Son Relationship in the Plays of Sam Shepard." Modern Drama 36.1 (1993): 12-26.

Wilcox, Leonard. "West's The Day of the Locust and Shepard's Angel City: Refiguring L.A. Noir." Modern Drama 36.1 (1993): 61-75.

Willadt, Susanne. "States of War in Sam Shepard's States of Shock." Modern Drama 36.1 (1993): 147-66.

Kane, Leslie. "Dreamers and Drunks: Moral and Social Consciousness in Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard." American Drama 1.1 (Fall 1991): 27 45.

Kleb, William E. "Curse of the Starving Class and the Logic of Destruction." Contemporary Theatre Review 8.4 (1998): 1-17.

Lanier, Gregory W. "Two Opposite Animals: Structural Pairing in Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind." Modern Drama 34.3 (Sep 1991): 410-21.

Lyons, Charles R. "Text as Agent in Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class." Comparative Drama 24.1 (Sprg 1990): 24-33.

McDonough, Carla J. "The Politics of Stage Space: Women and Male Identity in Sam Shepard's Family Plays." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 9.2 (Sprg 1995): 65-83.

McKelly, James C. "The Artist and the West: Two Portraits by Jack Kerouac and Sam Shepard." Western American Literature 26.4 (Wint 1992): 293-301.

Orbison, Tucker. "Authorization and Subversion of Myth in Shepard's Buried Child." Modern Drama 37.3 (Fall 1994): 509-20.

Porter, Laurin R. "Modern and Postmodern Wastelands: Long Day's Journey into Night and Shepard's Buried Child." Eugene O'Neill Review 17.1-2 (Sprg-Fall 1993): 106-19.

Rosen, Carol. "Sam Shepard, Feminist Playwright: The Destination of A Lie of the Mind." Contemporary Theatre Review 8.4 (1998): 29-37.

Schvey, Henry I. "The Master and His Double: Eugene O'Neill and Sam Shepard." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5.2 (Sprg 1991): 49-60.

Streufert, Paul D. "The Revolving Western: American Guilt and the Tragically Greek in Sam Shepard's Silent Tongue." American Drama 8.2 (Sprg 1999): 27-41.

| Top | Wilcox, Leonard. ed. Rereading Shepard: Contemporary Critical Essays on the Plays of Sam Shepard. NY: St. Martin's, 1993.

Bennett, Susan. "When a Woman Looks: The 'Other' Audience of Shepard's Plays." 168-79.

Carroll, Dennis. "Potential Performance Texts for The Rock Garden and 4-H Club." 22-41.

Crum, Jane-Ann. "'I Smash the Tools of My Captivity': The Feminine in Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind." 196-214.

DeRose, David J. "A Kind of Cavorting: Superpresence and Shepard's Family Dramas." 131-49.

Grace, Sherrill. "Lighting Out for the Territory Within: Field Notes on Shepard's Expressionist Vision." 180-95.

Hall, Ann C. "Speaking without Words: The Myth of Masculine Autonomy in Sam Shepard's Fool for Love." 150-67.

Londre, Felicia H. "A Motel of the Mind: Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind." 215-24.

Lyons, Charles R. "Shepard's Family Trilogy and the Conventions of Modern Realism." 115-30.

McCarthy, Gerry. "Memory and Mind: Sam Shepard's Geography of a Horse Dreamer." 58-76.

Rabillard, Sheila. "Shepard's Challenge to the Modernist Myths of Origin and Originality: Angel City and True West." 77-96.

Weales, Gerald. "Artifacts: The Early Plays Reconsidered." 8-21.

Wilcox, Leonard. "The Desert and the City: Operation Sidewinder and Shepard's Postmodern Allegory." 42-57.

Wilson, Ann. "True Stories: Reading the Autobiographic in Cowboy Mouth, 'True Dylan' and Buried Child." 97-114.

Williams, Megan. "Nowhere Man and the Twentieth-Century Cowboy: Images of Identity and American History in Sam Shepard's True West." Modern Drama 40.1 (Sprg 1997): 57-73.

MLA Style Citation of this Web Page

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 8: American Drama - Sam Shepard." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL:http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap8/shepard.html (provide page date or date of your login).

Born Samuel Shepard Rogers VII on November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, an army base near Chicago, to Jane Elaine Schook Rogers and Samuel Shepard Rogers. Sam Shepard oldest of three children (two sisters) would later change his name, reportedly because, "Steve Rogers was the name of the original Captain America." Shepard spends his childhood as an "army brat" on various bases from South Dakota to Florida to Utah and Guam. His father leaves the army, and moves the family to California in 1955 when Shepard was eleven years old. His home was an avocado ranch with cows and horses to tend as well. Shepard spends his high school years in Duarte. He studied agricultural science at Mount San Antonio Junior College from 1960-1961. He moved to New York City in 1962, worked as a stable hand, herdsman, orange picker, sheep shearer, bus boy, waiter and musician. In 1964 he began his career as a playwright with the Theatre Genesis's Obie Award-winning productions of two one-act plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery.

Shepard a product of the 1960s counterculture combines wild humor, grotesque satire, myth, and a sparse, haunting language to create a subversive pop art vision of America. His characters are typically loners and drifters caught between a mythical past and the mechanized present. In Cowboys, two buddies play what seems to be a game of cowboys and indians, re-enacting key episodes from Western mythology; episodes which lead to decay and the apparent death of one of the characters.

In 1965 Shepard claims drug addiction at draft board examination and then meets actress Joyce Aaron; the two live together for two years. Shepard and Aaron take a vacation trip to Mexico; the experience will prove inspiration for La Turista. Shepard will vow never to fly again as result of airplane trip in Mexico.

| Top | Shepard's first full-length play, La Turista, was performed at the American Place Theatre and won an Obie in 1967. Although he won critical acclaim and a small following, his offbeat and off-Broadway plays did not bring him much financial success, and he moved to England, living there from 1971-1975, where he wrote his rock-drama, The Tooth of Crime (1972) during his four years in London. The Tooth of Crime tells the story of two rock-stars of different generations who battle for territorial domination of an empire. Their duel to the death is not a gun battle, but a rap session in which each musician uses verbal incantations in order to pierce the mask and shatter the confidence of his opponent. The play was staged in its American premiere at Princeton University in 1972. Curse of the Starving Class followed in 1978, marking a new direction in Shepard's approach. The plays written from this point on feature a somewhat more realistic style although they retain devices of disturbing and imaginative surrealism such as the absent-but-present father who is able to confer with the son and daughter who have conjured him up in Fool for Love (1982).

Actor, screenwriter, director, and playwright with rugged good looks, a slider frame, and pleasant drawl seems to make him an all-American hero in the Gary Cooper mold. But it is his highly regarded playwrighting skills, which sets him apart from his other professional talents. Shepard won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 play Buried Child and was one of the writers on Zabriskie Point (1970). He later won critical acclaim for his original screenplay Paris, Texas (1984).

As an actor, Shepard made his film debut in Bob Dylan's pretentious Renaldo and Clara (1978), but turned heads in a series of considerably more interesting pictures to follow, most of which cast him as the strong, silent type: Days of Heaven (1978), Resurrection (1980), Raggedy Man (1981), Frances (1982, his first with longtime partner Jessica Lange), and especially The Right Stuff (1983), for which he earned an Oscar nomination playing fabled test pilot Chuck Yeager. He reteamed with Lange in Country (1984) and Crimes of the Heart (1986), and played the lead in Robert Altman's adaptation of his play Fool for Love (1985). People who remembered him performing his rock 'n' roll play Cowboy Mouth with cowriter Patti Smith may have had a hard time reconciling that image of Shepard with the genial leading man opposite Diane Keaton in Baby Boom (1987) or Dolly Parton in Steel Magnolias (1989), or the quiet but determined police detectives he played in Defenseless (1991) and Thunderheart (1992), but the actor/writer has had no problem wearing more than one hat comfortably. Shepard is also cast well in Bright Angel (1991), in Volker Schlondorff's provocative Voyager (1991, as the title character) and as the self-destructive law professor costarring Julia Roberts in The Pelican Brief (1993). Shepard made an inauspicious directing debut with Far North (1988, starring Lange and more recently he tackle a Western, Silent Tongue (1994).

| Top | Works/Awards/Citations

1964 Shepard's first plays Cowboys and Rock Garden, produced at Theater Genesis on October 10, 1965 Dog and Rocking Chair, Up to Thursday and 4-H Club, Chicago, Icarus's Mother

1966. Awarded Obies for Chicago, Icarus's Mother, and Red Cross, Fourteen Hundred Thousand
1967. La Turista, Melodrama Play, Cowboys #2, Forensic & the Navigators, receives grants

      From University of Minnesota, Yale, and Rockefeller Foundation

1968. Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship, cowrites screenplay for Me and My Brother, contributes to script for Zabriskie Point
1969. The Holy Ghostly, The Unseen Hand 1970 Zabriskie Point, Operation Sidewinder, Shaved Splits, Mad Dog Blues, Cowboy Mouth, Back Bog Beast Bait
1970. The Tooth of Crime
1971. Publishes book of poetry, Hawk Moon; Blue Bitch
1972. Geography of a Horse Dreamer, Little Ocean, The Tooth of Crime, Action
1973. Killer's Head, Rolling Thunder Logbook
1974. Receives Creative Arts Medal from Brandeis University, receives Rockefeller Grant, Angel City, Suicide in B-Flat
1975. Inacoma, Curse of the Starving Class
1976. Seduced, Buried Child, Tongues, appears in Days of Heaven and Renaldo and Clara
1977. Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Buried Children, Savage/Love, Jacaranda
1978. True West, appears in Resurrection
1979. Superstitions, appears in Frances and Raggedy Man
1980. Motel Chronicles
1981. Fool for Love, appears in The Right Stuff and receives Academy Award Nomination
1982. Screenplay for Paris, Texas, appears in Country
1983. The War in Heaven, A Lie of the Mind, appears in Fool for Love
1984. Appears in Crimes if the Heart
1985. Publishes "True Dylan" in Esquire, appears in Baby Boom
1986. Releases Far North
1987. Appears in Steel Magnolias

      States of Shock, appears in The Voyager and Defenseless

1988. Appears in Thunderheart

      1993 Appears in the Pelican Brief

      Simpatico, appears in Safe Passage, releases Silent Tongue

1989. Buried Child at the Steppenwolf
1990. Publishes Cruising Paradise, season of Shepard plays at the Signature Theatre

Selected Bibliography

Auerbach, Doris. Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Tucker, Martin. Sam Shepard. New York: Continuum, 1992.