True West

Sam Shepard's Life, Work, and Times

By: Robert Greenfield

Narrated by: Jon Lindstrom

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A revelatory 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 [True West] achieves in its finest pages is placing the artist in his time. . . . I was filled with excitement, envy and reverence for the New York City that embraced the young Shepard in the 1960s and early ’70s.”—Ethan Hawke, The Washington Post

True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times is the story of an American icon, a lasting portrait of Sam Shepard as he really was, revealed by those who knew him best. This sweeping biography charts Shepard’s long and complicated journey from a small town in Southern California to become an internationally known playwright and movie star. The only son of an alcoholic father, Shepard crafted a public persona as an authentic American archetype: the loner, the cowboy, the drifter, the stranger in a strange land. Despite his great critical and financial success, he seemed, like so many of his characters, to remain perpetually dispossessed.

Much like Robert Greenfield’s biographies of Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary, this book delves deeply into Shepard’s life as well as the ways in which his work illuminates it. True West takes listeners through the world of downtown theater in Lower Manhattan in the early sixties; the jazz scene at New York’s Village Gate; fringe theater in London in the seventies; Bob Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder tour; the making of classic films like Zabriskie Point, Days of Heaven, and The Right Stuff; and Broadway productions of Buried Child, True West, and Fool for Love.

For this definitive biography, Greenfield interviewed dozens of people who knew Shepard well, many of whom had never before spoken on the record about him. While exploring his relationships with Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange across the long arc of his brilliant career, Greenfield makes the case for Shepard as not just a great American writer but a unique figure who first brought the sensibility of rock ’n’ roll to theater.

©2023 Robert Greenfield (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“What Robert Greenfield’s new biography, True West, achieves in its finest pages is placing the artist in his time. Greenfield recounts the ebb and flow of Shepard’s growth as a playwright, and chronicles how the fame and adulation from his life as a movie actor both propelled and thwarted his gifts as a writer . . . The book is especially successful at bringing the reader into the world that Shepard inhabited as he developed into one of the greatest American dramatists of the late 20th century.”—Ethan Hawke, Washington Post

“In his eventful life, Sam Shepard managed to write indelible plays while inventing his own brand of iconic American manhood: the rock ’n’ roll cowboy playwright. Robert Greenfield’s vivid, clear-eyed biography captures both the man and the myth—and, perhaps most important, the writer, who sang a new kind of song in American theater, as raw and searching as the western skies.”—Michael Schulman, author of Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep and Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears

“Telling the tale of a multi-talented man ‘always blinded by his own light’ is a daunting task, but astute biographer Robert Greenfield handles it beautifully in True West. Written with insight, empathy, and authority, this biography of the protean Sam Shepard presents the man whole, with all his dazzling complexities revealed in full.”—Kenneth Turan, former Los Angeles Times film critic and co-author of Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told

Great life, many addictions

The creative process for writing and directing and staging a play just right or nobody will see the play. personal life overlapping with alcohol, drug and tobacco addiction. Many people correct this problem at age 25 or 30. Many Creative people take longer to change. Heroic struggle for the ending years of his life.

Wow!

A life long fan of Sam Shepard, this book has been a true gift! He was a private man so all of this was fascinating news. This is not a controlled Hollywood polish but a detailed account. Taking us through the writing and production of his plays, acting, relationships and often this thoughts. Jon Lindstrom does a clear and outstanding job at telling the story. I feel I have more of an understanding of Sam, and I look forward to listening to this time and time again. Thank You Robert Greenfield and Mr. Lindstrom.

Ridiculously hammy narration/recycled information.

Sam Shepard is one of my literary/dramatic heroes, and he had a truly magnetic screen presence. I always thought he had led an interesting life, as well, but after listening to this book's overheated prose (I should have known to expect this, as Robert Greenfield's early-'70s Stones book suffered from the same affliction) and ridiculously hammy narration (the narrator reads the entire text like some parody of the interior monologue in a Philip Marlowe potboiler, complete with mincing "softening" of his voice when he recites quotes by women in the story), I'm not sure I feel that way anymore, or at least it's very hard to leave this book with that impression. Greenfield seems so simultaneously enthralled by the "renegade machismo" side of Shepard's (admittedly self-created/-promoted) myth that I didn't feel like I really knew the man any better after listening to this whole book, and the entire thing (at least until talking about the last several years of Shepard's life, since those were not covered by earlier biographers) seems to be recycled from other, presumably better Shepard bios. [The most interesting tidbits are always proceeded by "According to (previous) Shepard biographer_____ ....,"] I strongly suspect that anyone who wants to know more about Sam should read one of those other biographies.