True West: Sam Shepard's Life, Work, and Times by Robert Greenfield. Crown 2013. 448 pages.
Robert Greenfield's biography of Sam Shepard is the latest in an ever-growing list of literature about the legendary playwright who the theater world credits for creating a new approach to drama. These books include Sam Shepard by Don Shewey, (1985), Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer by Ellen Oumano (1987), and Sam Shepard: A Life by John J. Winters (2017), as well as collected interviews, collected scholarly essays, and Shepard's own correspondence with his best friend Johnny Dark, his several memoirs, sometimes lightly disguised as fiction, among them Motel Chronicles, when he was at his creative peak, and Spy of the First Person, the last book of his life, which he wrote in his final days as he was struggling with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This massive catalogue begs the question, "Do we need another Sam Shepard retrospective?
New information does emerge in Greenfield's book, primarily in the final chapters, which describe moments during Shepard's end of life surrounded by his sisters, adult children, and old friends and lovers (including Patti Smith) moving in and out of his Kentucky home. As the book title suggests, Greenfield does more than recap one of the playwright's most memorable plays. He portrays Shepard as a rugged individualist, a cowboy, a wanderer known to drive his pickup truck across the country, in part because of a fear of flying, but in large measure because the American landscape was the source of his material.
Shepard was multifaceted for sure. Animals were one of his lifelong passions. His deferred dream of becoming a veterinarian as a boy led him to buying and racing greyhounds throughout a two-year stay in England during his first marriage to O-Lan Jones. In his later years, he raised and sold racehorses in Kentucky. In a quest to achieve a harmonious life, he studied "The Work" of philosopher George Gurdjieff. He admired Samuel Beckett, perhaps his greatest influence as a dramatist. His turn as an actor in more than 60 films gave him the income he wanted to continue writing and nourishing his wanderlust, which was uprooted for two decades when he ran away with Jessica Lange and started with her a nomadic family that would continually return to Lange's Minnesota hometown.
Greenfield compiles a lot of information from Shepard's earlier biographers and captures fresh content from his interviews with many friends and theatrical associates who alternately admired and reviled him. Thanks to this book, we can trace the path we want to define this American original.
