Buried Child | Author Biography

Like the plays he writes, Sam Shepard's life and career have been unpredictable, wide-ranging, well-traveled, and, ultimately, quintessentially American. Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, on November 5, 1943. His father was in the Army Air Corps, and the family moved around from base to base before settling on an avocado ranch in Duarte, California. There, the future playwright found a love for horses and the outdoors that has remained with him ever since. He also picked up his father's drums and discovered a love for music that found its way into many of his plays.

Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard

In his semi-retirement, Shepard's father became an abusive alcoholic. After a series of violent confrontations, young Sam joined a touring repertory theatre group called the Bishop's Company, left home, and eventually found his way to the opposite coast: New York City. His arrival in New York in the early-1960s couldn't have been better timed. Although he was only nineteen years old, with a few months of acting experience and a single, unproduced play to his credit, the Off-Broadway theatre scene was just gaining momentum. It was there, in the tiny experimental studios and renovated churches of the underground theatre movement, that Shepard found his niche as a playwright.

His first professional production was a pair of one-acts, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, produced by Theatre Genesis at Saint Mark Church-in-the-Bowery in 1964. Although the popular press dubbed the new writer's work a pale imitation of Absurdist author Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), the Village Voice and other counterculture publications gave him rave reviews and encouraged him to write more. Over the next several years, Shepard produced a series of experimental, poetic, musical one-acts and full-length plays that earned him a string of Obie Awards (Off-Broadway's equivalent of the Tony Award) and a cult following in New York and London, where he temporarily relocated in the early-1970s.

The Tooth of Crime (1972) and Curse of the Starving Class (1977) earned Shepard wider recognition, and larger audiences, but it wasn't until Buried Child (1978) that he gained mainstream acceptance. The play earned Shepard his tenth Obie Award (no other American playwright has won more than two) as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama. With typical, Midwestern-style humility, Shepard declared, ‘‘If I was gonna write a play that would win the Pulitzer Prize, I think it would have been that play, you know. It's sort of a typical Pulitzer Prize-winning play. It wasn't written for that purpose; it was a kind of test. I wanted to write a play about a family.’’

All of Shepard's plays are characterized by an obvious love of language and a flair for visual imagery. Often, the imagery he conjures is of the American West. His characters are obsessed with American myths and metaphors—cowboys and Indians, ranches, deserts, and other wide open spaces—and often the plots of his plays parallel familiar folk tales or religious parables. Thematically, he is often concerned with the American Dream and its effects on families, though the fathers, mothers, and sons that inhabit his work tend to be much darker, even more frightening aspects of those that appear in the plays, movies, and television of popular culture.

Since the success of Buried Child, Shepard has produced other popular plays, two of which, True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983), have been turned into films. In the 1970s, Shepard himself turned to film, finding his way back to acting. He has appeared on screen in such films as Days of Heaven, Frances, The Right Stuff, and Steel Magnolias, as well as Robert Altman's film version of his play Fool for Love (1985).