A key difference between a man like Sam Shepard and today’s dismal exemplars of hypermasculinity is that his currency was guilt, whereas now the watchword is resentment. The former internalizes blame, forging stoics, while the latter assigns it elsewhere, yielding brats. Sam Shepard was open about his fears and spent his life trying to understand them. He did not sharpen them into weapons to use on others.
~ Michael O’Donnell via The Atlantic
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He was yesterday’s idea of a modern man: strong but vulnerable, brooding until he had something profound to say, deeply flawed but right when it counted. Sam Shepard’s plays are full of anxiety, uncertainty, violence, and the raw friction that pushes men and women, fathers and sons, further away from each other in the grappling match of family life.
~ Michael O’Donnell via The Atlantic
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The cowboy image may have been cultivated, but it was not false. You might say it was earned, the vaquero as self-made man. Sam Shepard — reluctant movie star, poet of masculine angst, and rock-and-roll hero of the American theater — thought Broadway and Hollywood were full of middlebrow nonsense.
~ Michael O’Donnell via The Atlantic
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Sam Shepard wasn’t born a cowboy. The actor and writer made himself into one. The dusty blue jeans, cattle drives, and folksy drawl suited his taciturn profile, giving Reagan-era America someone rugged to admire.
~ Michael O’Donnell via The Atlantic
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Like his friend Cormac McCarthy — who grew up in a Tennessee suburb but likewise drifted west—Sam Shepard found in open spaces a wellspring of bracing truth.
~ Michael O’Donnell via The Atlantic
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