A revelatory, magisterial biography of Sam Shepard--the dark, rugged genius of modern American theater and film, "the poet laureate of America's emotional badlands" (Jack Kroll). Sam Shepard was a true American original. A theater and film icon who lived life on a mythic scale, Shepard became an embodiment of the fierce independence and wild freedom of the American West. Taking us from the creative explosion of downtown New York City in the 1960s to Bob Dylan's legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour, from Hollywood backlots and film shoots in the Mojave Desert to the horse ranches where Shepard went to escape it all, Robert M. Dowling's biography reveals this playwright, actor, and filmmaker as we've never known him before.
In this authoritative and gripping biography, acclaimed biographer Robert M. Dowling dives into Shepard's psyche, his imagination and his soul, to craft the most comprehensive and revelatory account yet of Shepard's enduring work and tumultuous life. Ranging from Shepard's romances with icons like Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange, to his groundbreaking artistic contributions to theater and film like True West, Buried Child, The Right Stuff, Days of Heaven, and Paris, Texas, Dowling draws on previously untapped archival resources and the help of members of Shepard's family, close friends, lovers, and collaborators to place this artistic legacy in the context of the historic upheavals that compelled this extraordinary writer to so vividly record the American zeitgeist. In this biography, we see Shepard's life, and his era, in all its splendor and chaos, from the 1960s counterculture to the rise of Trumpism.
Situating the facts of Shepard's spirited and darkly complex personality alongside keen analyses of Shepard's ingenious writing, this new biography couples rich storytelling with scholarly rigor to present the definitive biography of one of America's most innovative and troubled creative geniuses.
About the Author :
Robert M. Dowling is professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. He is the author of Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem and the biography Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts, which was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for biography in 2015. He has also coedited the 2021 compendium of interviews Conversations with Sam Shepard. As an authority on American drama, he has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, among other media venues. He serves on the editorial board of The Eugene O'Neill Review and is an elected Board member of the Eugene O'Neill Society (President of the Society, 2018-2021).
Review :
"A penetrating new biography....not the first biography of Shepard, but it is finally the one that an artist of his stature deserves....Coyote also benefits from extensive access to Shepard's intimates, who have avoided prior biographers, as well as to his journals and correspondence, which Dowling quotes to illuminating effect....[an] excellent biography." --The Atlantic "The most complete portrait of Shepard's life to date....Dowling is a discerning and sympathetic...guide through Shepard's oeuvre." --Wall Street Journal
"Shepard...remains a constant presence in the theatre....Lately, there has been a flourishing of Shepard adaptations....In reading Robert M. Dowling's striking new biography of Shepard, Coyote, I came to appreciate that these new writers are excavating currents already buried in Shepard's bedrock." --The New Yorker
"Detailed and dramatic....[Dowling] analyzes individual plays while paying keen attention not only to their language and critical reception, but the circumstances of their writing and first performances... superb." --Spectator World
"Exacting....Few biographers have so deftly connected the art surrounding Shepard to the art he made....Dowling's strength, as in his earlier Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts, lies in his ability to fuse literary criticism with biography.... Dowling writes with a dramatist's cadence, favoring the long sinuous sentence, the sudden aphorism....a biography that breathes, full of wind and motion." --Arkansas Democrat Gazette
"[Dowling] probes the connection between the playwright's beguiling dramatic works and how they align to Shepard's turbulent personal life...commendable." --Art Fuse
"Dowling illuminates Shepard's creative evolution play by play, book by book, and film by film and tracks his painfully conflictful relationships with those he loved most....Dowling's exceptionally fluent portrait-in-full vividly and indelibly conveys Shepard's brilliance, fury, anguish, passion for nature, and hunger for expression, love, and freedom." --Booklist
"Shepard, the Bob Dylan of American Drama, had an almost unbelievably eventful life, and Robert M. Dowling's essential biography illuminates every corner of it, while providing a wonderfully clear guide to Shepard's tangled, massively influential body of work." --David Auburn, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright "Through a truly heroic level of research, and a keen critical read of Sam Shepard's plays, novels, memoir, and films, Robert M. Dowling has crafted a portrait not just of a man, but of the multiple generations of American life during which Shepard was a defining artist. Coyote takes on the nearly impossible task of telling the life story of one of the most complicated men to ever lay hand to typewriter, and does it with aplomb, setting the dream life of his written work against the real life as he lived it." --Isaac Butler, author of The Method and The World Only Spins Forward
Praise for Robert M. Dowling's Eugene O'Neill "Scrupulously researched and elegantly written . . . required reading for anyone in the theater." --Nathan Lane, The New York Times Book Review
"A richly drawn portrait . . . As a biographer, Dowling is generous and inclusive." --Bookforum
"[An] important story, perceptively recounted." --Washington Post
