Early in 1998, a new Shepard play,
Eyes for Consuela, opened at the Manhattan Theater Club. Shepard has also published three collections,
Hawk Moon: A Book of Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues (1972),
Motel Chronicles (1982), and
Cruising Paradise: Tales (1996), anthologies of fiction, vignettes, tales, poems, songs, and autobiographical musings.
Before he gained renown as an actor, Shepard was widely regarded as the most important playwright of his generation. He was featured on the covers of Newsweek (11 November 1985) and Esquire (November 1988), as well as in a special issue of Modern Drama (March 1993). Richard Gilman, in his introduction to Seven Plays (1981), declared, "Not many critics would dispute the proposition that Sam Shepard is our most interesting and exciting playwright." By the end of 1997, The Modern Language Association International Bibliography listed almost 240 entries for Shepard, testimony to the amount of scholarly interest his work has generated. As a popular-culture icon, Shepard is also the subject of several World Wide Web sites.
Throughout his plays Shepard demonstrates a concern that plagues American writers who mine the mythic lode.
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