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.

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.

The author accomplishes his biographical investigation without diminishing Shepard’s legacy as one of America’s greatest playwrights. A masterful look at the wild life of an enigmatic artist that shows how captivating the truth can be..

Riveting.