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An intimate portrait of the iconic playwright, actor, and director Sam Shepard, whose wide-ranging and enduring body of workplaces him at the center of the American canon, from an award-winning biographer
True West is the story of an American icon, a lasting portrait of who Sam Shepard really was, as revealed by those who knew him best. This sweeping biography takes readers inside the world that made Shepard, the son of an alcoholic father who grew up in a dysfunctional family and as a result always viewed the world as an outsider. The public persona he crafted throughout his career came to embody an authentic American archetype: the loner, the cowboy, the drifter, a stranger in a strange land. Despite his great critical and financial success, he seemed, like so many of his characters, to remain perpetually dispossessed.
In the fashion of Robert Greenfield's exemplary biographies of Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia, this book delves profoundly into Shepard's life and the ways in which his work illuminates it. True West takes readers through the world of downtown theater in lower Manhattan in the early sixties, the jazz scene at the Village Gate, fringe theatre in London in the seventies, Bob Dylan's legendary Rolling Thunder tour, the making of classic films like Zabriskie Point, Days of Heaven, and The Right Stuff, and Broadway productions of Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love.
For this definitive biography of a true original, Greenfield interviewed dozens of people who knew Shepard well, many of whom had never before spoken on the record about him. Exploring his relationships with the greats-Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Terrence Malick, and the love of his life, Jessica Lange-across the long arc of his brilliant career, Greenfield makes the case for Shepard not just as one of the great American writers, but as the man who merged rock 'n roll with serious theater.
True West is the story of an American icon, a lasting portrait of who Sam Shepard really was, as revealed by those who knew him best. This sweeping biography takes readers inside the world that made Shepard, the son of an alcoholic father who grew up in a dysfunctional family and as a result always viewed the world as an outsider. The public persona he crafted throughout his career came to embody an authentic American archetype: the loner, the cowboy, the drifter, a stranger in a strange land. Despite his great critical and financial success, he seemed, like so many of his characters, to remain perpetually dispossessed.
In the fashion of Robert Greenfield's exemplary biographies of Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia, this book delves profoundly into Shepard's life and the ways in which his work illuminates it. True West takes readers through the world of downtown theater in lower Manhattan in the early sixties, the jazz scene at the Village Gate, fringe theatre in London in the seventies, Bob Dylan's legendary Rolling Thunder tour, the making of classic films like Zabriskie Point, Days of Heaven, and The Right Stuff, and Broadway productions of Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love.
For this definitive biography of a true original, Greenfield interviewed dozens of people who knew Shepard well, many of whom had never before spoken on the record about him. Exploring his relationships with the greats-Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Terrence Malick, and the love of his life, Jessica Lange-across the long arc of his brilliant career, Greenfield makes the case for Shepard not just as one of the great American writers, but as the man who merged rock 'n roll with serious theater.