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True west : Sam Shepard's life, work, and times / Robert Greenfield.

Greenfield, Robert, (author.).

Available copies

  • 1 of 1 copy available at LARL/NWRL Consortium.
  • 1 of 1 copy available at Lake Agassiz Regional Library. (Show preferred library)

Current holds

0 current holds with 1 total copy.

Location Call Number / Copy Notes Barcode Shelving Location Status Due Date
Cormorant LINK Site 921 SHE (Text) 33500013792544 New Available -

Record details

  • ISBN: 9780525575955
  • ISBN: 0525575952
  • Physical Description: xii, 432 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm
  • Edition: First edition.
  • Publisher: New York : Crown, [2023]

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 383-409) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:
Prologue: New York, New York -- Life during wartime -- The rose parade -- A strange kind of melting pot -- The real Gabby Hayes -- The village gate -- Theatre genesis -- La turista -- Forensic and the navigators -- Zabriskie point -- Maxagasm -- O-lan -- Operation sidewinder -- Cowboy mouth -- The tooth of crime -- The royal court -- Magic theatre -- Rolling thunder -- Days of Heaven -- Curse of the starving class -- Buried child -- True west -- True west redux -- When Sam met Jessica -- Fool for love -- Country matters -- See you in my dreams -- A lie of the mind -- Horse country -- Stillwater -- The late Henry Moss -- Don't come knocking -- The feeling of numbness -- Shepard and dark -- A particle of dread -- Spy of the first person -- Epilogue: endgame -- Coda: true west, again.
Summary, etc.:
"An intimate portrait of the iconic playwright, actor, and director Sam Shepard, whose wide-ranging and enduring body of work places him at the center of the American canon, from an award-winning biographer. True West is the story of an American icon, a lasting portrait of Sam Shepard as he really was, revealed by those who knew him best. This sweeping biography charts Shepard's long and complicated journey from a small town in southern California to his standing as an internationally known playwright and movie star. The son of an alcoholic father, Shepard crafted a public persona as an authentic American archetype: the loner, the cowboy, the drifter, a stranger in a strange land. Despite his great critical and financial success, he seemed, like so many of his characters, to remain perpetually dispossessed. Much like Robert Greenfield's biographies of Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary, this book delves deeply into Shepard's life as well as the ways in which his work illuminates it. True West takes readers through the world of downtown theater in lower Manhattan in the early sixties, the jazz scene at the Village Gate, fringe theatre in London in the seventies, Bob Dylan's legendary Rolling Thunder tour, the making of classic films like Zabriskie Point, Days of Heaven, and The Right Stuff, and Broadway productions of Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love. For this definitive biography, Greenfield interviewed dozens of people who knew Shepard well, many of whom had never before spoken on the record about him. While exploring his relationships with Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange across the long arc of his brilliant career, Greenfield makes the case for Shepard not just as a great American writer but a unique figure who first brought the sensibility of rock 'n' roll to serious theater"-- Provided by publisher.
Reviews

  • Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2023 April #1
    *Starred Review* The nexus between playwright, actor, and fiction writer Sam Shepard's life and art is intricate. His dozens of radical, unnerving, wildly imaginative, raging, sorrowful, and mordantly funny plays and stories are spiked with family trauma, autobiography, and mythologizing. Previous biographies have tracked this dynamic, but seasoned biographer Greenfield is the first to fully chronicle Shepard's entire, tempestuous, endlessly creative life from joining the 4-H Club in Southern California to arriving in New York City as a penniless college dropout in 1963 to attaining international acclaim to his heroic battle with ALS and death in 2017. Greenfield traces the indelible mark Shepard's father's fall from glory as a WWII fighter pilot to a down-and-out alcoholic left on the artist as he avidly chronicles each of Shepard's audacious and powerfully reverberating plays and their contentious productions, from off-off-Broadway to San Francisco's Magic Theatre and the stages of London. Drawing on extensive archives and conducting relevatory interviews, Greenfield tracks the influence of rock 'n' roll on Shepard's writing, the interplay between his plays and films, his notoriety, passion for horses, persistent solo cross-country drives, sustaining friendship with Johnny Dark, and great loves: O-Lan Jones, Patti Smith, and Jessica Lange. Sardonic, haunted, brilliant, and elusive, Shepard needed to be free and loved, while his dramatic quest was at once personal, reflective of the times, and steeped in humankind's ceaseless paradoxes. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.

Author Notes

A former associate editor of the London bureau of Rolling Stone, Robert Greenfield is the author of several classic rock books, among them S.T.P.: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones, as well as the definitive biographies of Bill Graham, Jerry Garcia, Timothy Leary, Ahmet Ertegun, Burt Bacharach, and Augustus Owsley Stanley III. An award-winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, he has published short fiction in GQ, Esquire, and Playboy. He lives in California.

Search for related items by subject

Subject: Shepard, Sam, 1943-2017.
Dramatists, American > 20th century > Biography.
Actors > United States > Biography.
Genre: Biographies.

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