True West

“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“Fascinating … a masterful look at the wild life of an enigmatic artist that shows how captivating the truth can be.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“[Robert] Greenfield … delivers a riveting account of the life of playwright and actor Sam Shepard… . Few readers will leave being unimpressed with Shepard, or this biography.”—Publishers Weekly

Robert Greenfield, a former associate editor of the London bureau of Rolling Stone, is the author of several classic rock books, among them S.T.P.- A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones, as well as biographies of Bill Graham, Jerry Garcia, Timothy Leary, Ahmet Ertegun, Burt Bacharach, and Augustus Owsley Stanley III. An award-winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, he has published short fiction in GQ, Esquire, and Playboy. He lives in California.

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