SOURCE: Schlatter, James F. “Some Kind of a Future: The War for Inheritance in the Work of Three American Playwrights of the 1970s.” South Central Review 7, no. 1 (spring 1990): 59-75.

In the following essay, Schlatter compares Fifth of July, Preston Jones's The Oldest Living Graduate, and Sam Shepard's Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child with respect to the cultural implications of the 1970s family presented by the plays.

George McGovern built his dreams for the presidency on the passionate exhortation to “come home, America!” His decisive defeat offers strong evidence that in 1972 America was not ready to do so. She would come home anyway three years later, following the fall of Saigon, but she would arrive on crutches, in wheelchairs, and in stainless steel boxes draped with American flags. And if this “homecoming” witnessed the return of young men and women from a senselessly prolonged odyssey marked...