Shepard, Sam (1943-2017), was an important American playwright and motion-picture actor. His best-known, partly autobiographical plays portray American society as dead, decaying, or destructive. Most of his works combine symbolism, myth, and ritual with elements of popular culture, such as Western movies, rock music, and detective stories. Shepard won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama for Buried Child (1978). This grim play concerns a young man and his girlfriend who visit the man’s grotesque family in the rural Midwest. There they discover a wasteland of hidden sin and guilt.
Shepard also presented a nightmarish view of the American family in his plays The Curse of the Starving Class (1977), True West (1980), A Lie of the Mind (1985), States of Shock (1991), and The Late Henry Moss (2000). He used rock music in The Tooth of Crime (1972), a symbolic story about the rivalry between two rock music stars. In Fool for Love (1983), Shepard examined an intense romantic relationship between a half-brother and sister. Shepard’s other plays include Red Cross (1966), Operation Sidewinder (1970), Ages of the Moon (2009), and Heartless (2012). His short stories were collected in Cruising Paradise (1997), Great Dream of Heaven (2002), and Day Out of Days (2010). He also wrote the autobiographical collection of short stories Motel Chronicles (1982) and the short novel The One Inside (2017). A short memoir, Spy of the First Person, was published later in 2017, after his death.
Shepard acted in a number of films, including Days of Heaven (1978); The Right Stuff (1983); Country (1984); The Pelican Brief (1994); All the Pretty Horses (2000); The Notebook (2004); Don’t Come Knocking (2005); The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007); Inhale (2010); Darling Companion, Mud, and Safe House (all 2012); and August: Osage County and Out of the Furnace (both 2013). Shepard also wrote several screenplays, including Paris, Texas (1984).
Sam Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, on Nov. 5, 1943. He grew up in southern California. Shepard died on July 27, 2017.
