Sam Shepard ranks as one of America's most celebrated dramatists. He has written nearly 50 plays and has seen his work produced across the nation, in venues ranging from Greenwich Village coffee shops to regional professional and community theatres, from college campuses to commercial Broadway houses. His plays are regularly anthologized, and theatre professors teach Sam Shepard as a canonical American author. Outside of his stage work, he has achieved fame as an actor, writer, and director in the film industry. With a career that now spans nearly 40 years, Sam Shepard has gained the critical regard, media attention, and iconic status enjoyed by only a rare few in American theatre. Throughout his career Shepard has amassed numerous grants, prizes, fellowships, and awards, including the Cannes Palme d'Or and the Pulitzer Prize. He has received abundant popular praise and critical adulation. While the assessment of Shepard's standing may evidence occasional hyperbole, there can be little doubt that he has spoken in a compelling way to American theatre audiences, and that his plays have found deep resonance in the nation's cultural imagination.
Samuel Shepard Rogers IV was born on November 5, 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. In the early years, Sam, the eldest of three children, led a rather nomadic life living on several military bases. His father was an army officer and former Air Force bomber during World War II while his mother was a teacher. His childhood experience of living in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father would often provide the recurrent dark themes in his writing as well as a preoccupation with the myth of the vanishing West. His writing commonly incorporated inventive language, symbolism, and non-linear storytelling while being populated with drifters, fading rock stars and others living on the edge.
The family finally settled in Duarte, CA where Sam graduated from high school in 1961. In his high school years he began acting and writing poetry. He also worked as a stable hand at a horse ranch in Chino from 1958-1960. Thinking he might become a veterinarian, Sam studied agriculture at Mount Antonio Junior College for a year; but when a traveling theater group, the Bishop's Company Repertory Players came through town, Sam joined up and left home. After touring with them during 1962-1963, he moved to New York City and worked as a bus boy at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village.
Sam began focusing his efforts on writing a series of of avant-garde one-act plays and eventually found his way to the off-off-Broadway scene to Theatre Genesis, a ragtag group that met in an upstairs room at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. There he had his first two plays produced on a double bill - "Cowboys" (1964) and "The Rock Garden" (1964). After the University of Minnesota offered him a grant in 1966, he won OBIE Awards for "Chicago," "Icarus' Mother" and "Red Cross" - an unprecedented feat to win three in the same year. In 1967, Sam wrote his first full-length play, "La Turista," an allegory on the Vietnam War about two American tourists in Mexico, and was honored again with his fourth OBIE.
After receiving an OBIE for "Melodrama Play" (1968) and "Cowboys #2" (1968), Sam received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. He put his music skills taught to him by his father to use by playing drums and guitar in the rock band, the Holy Modal Rounders, in which he played for the next few years while continuing to write plays. In 1969 he married O-lan Jones Dark and together they had a son, Jesse Mojo Shepard. At this time, Sam made tentative steps toward screenwriting, having his first teleplay, "Fourteen Hundred Thousand" (NET, 1969), broadcast on television. He got a taste of Hollywood when he was one of several screenwriters on Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" (1970). In 1971, after a high-profile relationship with singer-poet Patti Smith - despite being married to actress O-Lan Jones Dark - Sam and his family moved to London, where he spent three years writing more plays, including "The Tooth of the Crime" (1972). The play crossed the Atlantic for a U.S. production in 1973, winning the young playwright yet another OBIE.
In 1974, Sam returned to the United States, where he was set up as the playwright in residence at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, a post he held for the next ten years. Meanwhile, he joined Bob Dylan's "Rolling Thunder Revue," the singer-songwriter's traveling band of musicians who covered the northern hemisphere in the mid-1970s. He was originally hired to write a movie about the tour, but instead produced a book later on called "The Rolling Thunder Logbook". He then entered the cinema world with the lead role in Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven" (1978), which served to raise his profile. It was a lucky stroke. The screenplay was written by Rudolph Wurlitzer, who was also on Dylan's tour. Despite his branching out into other a