Conversations with Sam Shepard

A prolific playwright Sam Shepard (1943-2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays for which he won many awards including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling Oscar-nominated film actor appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. <p/> The selected interviews in <i>Conversations with Sam Shepard</i> begin in 1969 when Shepard already a multiple Obie winner was twenty-six and end in 2016 eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim the voice the writer and the man evolved but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California his early days as a playwright in New York City his professionally formative time in London his interests and influences the mythology of the American Dream his own plays and more. In <i>Conversations with Sam Shepard</i> the playwright reveals himself in his own words.