True Stories: Reading the Autobiographic in Cowboy Mouth, ‘True Dylan’ and Buried Child

Abstract

Sam Shepard is an anomaly among American playwrights: one of the most critically acclaimed playwrights of his generation who has been honoured with a number of awards (including Obies, a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for A Lie of the Mind); he is popularly known as an actor in commercially successful American movies, including The Right Stuff (for which he received a nomination for an Academy Award). He is a celebrity whose face is so recognisable that it is not uncommon for photographs of him to grace the covers of mainstream publications such as Newsweek and Esquire. The terms of Shepard’s celebrity are interesting, not just because he is a celebrated playwright who is probably better known for his movie roles, but because the recurring comment made about him is that he is a private man who shuns publicity.¹ If Sam Shepard is so publicity-shy, why has he granted interviews to magazines ranging from American Film to Vogue? Why, when the evidence seems to counter the contention that Shepard is a recluse in the order of Pynchon and Salinger, does the image of him as a private, inaccessible figure persist? These questions address the problem of Sam Shepard’s identity as a public figure which is, in Shepard’s case, particularly complex.