True West
Sam Shepard's Life, Work, and Times
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- €4.49
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- €4.49
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A revelatory biography of the world-famous playwright and actor Sam Shepard, whose work was matched by his equally dramatic life, including collaborations with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan as well as tumultuous relationships with Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange
“What [True West] achieves in its finest pages is placing the artist in his time. . . . I was filled with excitement, envy and reverence for the New York City that embraced the young Shepard in the 1960s and early ’70s.”—Ethan Hawke, The Washington Post
True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times is the story of an American icon, a lasting portrait of Sam Shepard as he really was, revealed by those who knew him best. This sweeping biography charts Shepard’s long and complicated journey from a small town in Southern California to become an internationally known playwright and movie star. The only son of an alcoholic father, Shepard crafted a public persona as an authentic American archetype: the loner, the cowboy, the drifter, the stranger in a strange land. Despite his great critical and financial success, he seemed, like so many of his characters, to remain perpetually dispossessed.
Much like Robert Greenfield’s biographies of Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary, this book delves deeply into Shepard’s life as well as 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 New York’s Village Gate; fringe theater 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, Greenfield interviewed dozens of people who knew Shepard well, many of whom had never before spoken on the record about him. While exploring his relationships with Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange across the long arc of his brilliant career, Greenfield makes the case for Shepard as not just a great American writer but a unique figure who first brought the sensibility of rock ’n’ roll to theater.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greenfield (Mother American Night), a former Rolling Stone editor, delivers a riveting account of the life of playwright and actor Sam Shepard (1943–2017). Shepard, Greenfield suggests, was as a tortured soul who led a charmed life and had a knack for landing in the right place at the right time, starting with Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. The burgeoning writer remained "immune to... the social and political turbulence" of the countercultural '60s, but was ready for its sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, carving a niche as an experimental playwright and occasional rock drummer. Shepard's ascent in the New York theater world connected him with acting roles in Hollywood that helped fund his writing and led to a long-term relationship with actor Jessica Lange. Greenfield notes that even as Shepard garnered accolades for his plays and acting, he was tormented by his fraught relationship with his domineering, alcoholic father, a relationship that inspired the unhappy families in his plays. Greenfield doesn't shy away from the less savory aspects of Shepard's character, such as the marginalization of women in his work, and the keen attention to Shepard's psychology makes for an illuminating portrait of a larger-than-life figure. Few readers will leave being unimpressed with Shepard, or this biography.
