Understanding Sam Shepard

Download or read book Understanding Sam Shepard written by James A. Crank and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ideal introduction into the complex and compelling dramas of the acclaimed playwright Understanding Sam Shepard investigates the notoriously complex and confusing dramatic world of Sam Shepard, one of America's most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging contemporary playwrights. During his nearly fifty-year career as a writer, actor, director, and producer, Shepard has consistently focused his work on the ever-changing American cultural landscape. James A. Crank's comprehensive study of Shepard offers scholars and students of the dramatist a means of understanding Shephard's frequent experimentation with language, setting, characters, and theme. Beginning with a brief biography of Shepard, Crank shows how experiences in Shepard's life eventually resonate in his work by exploring the major themes, unique style, and history of Shepard's productions. Focusing first on Shepard's early plays, which showcase highly experimental, frenetic explorations of fractured worlds, Crank discusses how the techniques from these works evolve and translate into the major works in his "family trilogy": Curse of the Starving Class, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child, and True West. Shepard often uses elements from his past—his relationship with his father, his struggle for control within the family, and the breakdown of the suburban American dream—as major starting points in his plays. Shepard is a recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, eleven Obie Awards, and a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Augmented with an extensive bibliography, Understanding Sam Shepard is an ideal point of entrance into complex and compelling dramas of this acclaimed playwright.

Download or read book Two Prospectors written by Sam Shepard and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pulitzer Prize-winning author of plays such as True West, Fool For Love, and Buried Child, and Academy Award-nominated actor in many films, including The Right Stuff, Sam Shepard is arguably America's finest working dramatist. He has said many times that he will never write a memoir. But he has written intensively about his inner life and creative work to his former father-in-law and housemate, Johnny Dark. This book gathers nearly 40 years of their correspondence, which provides the most honest and complete record of Shepard's professional and personal lives that he is ever likely to publish. The book is illustrated with Dark's candid, revealing photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters.It makes a perfect companion to Treva Wurmfeld's recent film, Shepard & Dark"--

Download or read book Sam Shepard written by John J. Winters and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “John Winters offers a master class in literary sleuthing, untangling the many lives and unearthing the origin story of America’s foremost Renaissance man of letters.” —Kelly Horan, coauthor of Devotion and Defiance With more than fifty–five plays to his credit—including the 1979 Pulitzer Prize–winning Buried Child, an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, and an onscreen persona that’s been aptly summed up as “Gary Cooper in denim”—Sam Shepard’s impact on American theater and film ranks with the greatest playwrights and actors of the past half–century. Sam Shepard: A Life gets to the heart of Sam Shepard, presenting a compelling and comprehensive account of his life and work. In a new epilogue, added by the author after Shepard’s untimely death in July of 2017, John J. Winters offers a glimpse into the enigmatic author’s last days, when very few knew he was suffering from ALS. “An excellent biography . . . Mr. Winters is especially good on the backstage of one of Mr. Shepard’s most frequently revived works, True West . . . Mr. Winters has an interesting story to tell, and he recounts it ably, bringing us close to a figure who, he admits, avoids intimacy.” —The Wall Street Journal “A new, thoroughly researched biography . . . Winters does indeed capture a personality more anxious and self–doubting than previous biographers have grasped.” —The Washington Post “Meticulously presents the facts of Shepard’s complex life along with incisive descriptions and analyses of diverse productions of Shepard’s demanding and innovative plays . . . Winters portrays Shepard as a magnetic, enigmatic, and multitalented artist drawing on a deep well of loneliness and self–questioning, keen attunement to the zeitgeist, and penetrating insight into human nature.” —Booklist (starred review)

Download or read book The One Inside written by Sam Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-01-16 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This searing, extraordinarily evocative narrative opens with a man in his house at dawn, surrounded by aspens, coyotes cackling in the distance as he quietly navigates the distance between present and past. As memory overtakes him, he sees the bygone America of his childhood: the farmland and the feedlots, the railyards and the diners—and, most hauntingly, his father’s young girlfriend, with whom he also became involved, setting into motion a tragedy that has stayed with him. His complex interiority is filtered through views of mountains and deserts as he drives across the country, propelled by Benzedrine, rock and roll, and a restlessness born out of exile. The rhythms of theater, the language of poetry, and a flinty humor combine in this stunning meditation on the nature of experience, at once celebratory, surreal, poignant, and unforgettable.

Download or read book Spy of the First Person written by Sam Shepard and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final work from the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, actor, and musician, drawn from his transformative last days In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard’s extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator’s memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment—for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust. But at the book’s core, and his, is family—his relationships with those he loved, and with the natural world around him. Vivid, haunting, and deeply moving, Spy of the First Person takes us from the sculpted gardens of a renowned clinic in Arizona to the blue waters surrounding Alcatraz, from a New Mexico border town to a condemned building on New York City’s Avenue C. It is an unflinching expression of the vulnerabilities that make us human—and an unbound celebration of family and life.

Download or read book Motel Chronicles written by Sam Shepard and published by City Lights Publishers. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motel Chronicles reveals the fast-moving and sometimes surprising world of the man behind the plays that have made Sam Shepard a live legend in the theater. Shepard chronicles his own life birth in Illinois, childhood memories of Guam, Pasadena and rural Southern California, adventures as ranch hand, waiter, rock musician, dramatist, and film actor. Scenes from this book form the basis of his play Superstitions, and of the film (directed by Wim Wenders) Paris, Texas, winner of the Golden Palm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

Download or read book The Rolling Thunder Logbook written by Sam Shepard and published by Bobcat Books. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autumn, 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue - a rag-tag variety show, a travelling gypsy circus - swept across the Northeast US. Bob Dylan helmed the chaotic caravan, gathering a host of stars in his wake: Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, T-Bone Burnett, Joni Mitchell and others. The Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Sam Shepard was invited to write a Fellini-esque film out of the chaos. Throughout the many moods and moments of his travels he kept an impressionistic logbook of life on the road, replete with poetry, sketches and intimate accounts: This is that logbook. Updated with a myriad of candid photographs - many never before published - a foreword by T-Bone Burnett and a poetical preface from Sam Shepard, The Rolling Thunder Logbook perfectly captures the camaraderie, isolation, head games and pill-popping mayhem of the tour, providing a window into Dylan's singular talent, enigmatic charisma, and vision of America. “The Rolling Thunder Revue was more fun than the law allows. By a long shot. It was a bus full of musicians and singers and painters hurtling through the dead of night, making a movie, writing songs, and playing some of the most incendiary, intense, and inspired rock ‘n’ roll, before or since.” T-Bone Burnett