Coyote: The Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard

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.

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).