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Maybe someday
38
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
40/100Critics
36/100Scholars
Author:
Robert Greenfield
Publisher:
Crown
Date:
April 11, 2023
A biography of the world-famous playwright and actor Sam Shepard, whose work was matched by his equally dramatic life, including collaborations with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan as well as tumultuous relationships with Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange.
What The Reviewers Say
Sam Shepard was a complicated man. Capturing his persona and making a clear narrative out of his mercurial life are not easy tasks.
Judge a party not by who’s there, the old credo goes, but by who isn’t. The missing voices include those of O-Lan Jones, Shepard’s first wife; his longtime partner, Jessica Lange; his lovers Patti Smith and Brooke Adams and Joni Mitchell.
Without lacking respect for Shepard’s talent or personal struggles, Mr. Greenfield deconstructs a few of the Shepard myths.
To organize Shepard’s sprawling creative life and to connect the art to his own tormented emotional struggle for authenticity, a biographer needs to impose some kind of overriding narrative vision on the work and on the psychology of the man. Robert Greenfield’s True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times doesn’t have the candlepower to do the job.
