Samuel Shepard Rogers III was an actor, playwright, author, screenwriter, and director whose career extended fifty years. He won 10 Obie Awards, which is more than any other writer or director. He wrote 58 plays and several books of short stories, essays, and diaries.
Shepard won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. In 1983, for his role as pilot Chuck Yeager in the movie The Right Stuff, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was named a master American playwright by the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award in 2009.
New York magazine called Shepard “the greatest American playwright of his generation.” Shepard’s plays are known for having dark, poetic, and surrealist parts, as well as black comedy and people who live on the edges of American society with no roots.
Do you know that Mark Sheehan, the bassist for The Script, dἰed? The rock band from Dublin said that Mark had dἰed of an illness:
His early off-off-Broadway plays were funny, but his later plays like Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class were more realistic. If you don’t know how Sam Shepard dἰed, you should read our article.
Sam Shepard Cause of Deἀth
Shepard dἰed of symptoms from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) on July 27, 2017, at his home in Midway, Kentucky. He was 73 years old. In The New Yorker, Patti Smith wrote about the long time they worked together.
Matthew McConaughey, who had worked with Shepard in the movie Mud, found out about his deἀth during a TV interview. He was shocked by the news and said, “See you in the next one, Sam.”
The Wittliff Collections of Southwestern Writers at Texas State University have 27 boxes (13 linear feet) of Sam Shepard’s papers, while the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has 30 document boxes (12.6 linear feet) of his materials.
