Sam Shepard

It's the birthday of playwright Sam Shepard (books by this author), born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois (1943). He grew up mostly in California, but one day took everything he owned, put it in his car, and left. He ended up in a traveling theater troupe on the East Coast, and he said, "We crisscrossed New England, up into Maine and Vermont. The country amazed me, having come from a place that was brown and hot and covered with taco stands. Finally, we hit New York City and I couldn't believe it. I'd always thought of the 'big city' as Pasadena and the Rose Parade. I was mesmerized by this place."

Shepard got a job as a busboy, and the headwaiter at the restaurant was Ralph Cook, founder of Theatre Genesis, an off-off-Broadway theater doing experimental work. They needed some new one-act plays, so Cook encouraged the enthusiastic busboy to submit work, and Shepard wrote play after play, sometimes writing an entire play in one sitting. In 1964, his first plays were produced, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, at a church in the East Village, St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. Sam Shepard was 20 years old.

He wrote more than 40 plays before his death in 2017, including Buried Child (1978), which won the Pulitzer Prize, True West (1980), A Lie of the Mind (1985), and Ages of the Moon (2009).

He wrote on a typewriter and refused to do any research online. He said, "The things that I wonder about most are not on the Internet, I promise you that."