Glenn is a Ph.D. specializing in theatre history and literature. In this essay he examines the importance of the harvest ritual to the plot and character construction of Buried Child.

Sam Shepard has often been called a mythic playwright, one whose work summons the contradictory images and archetypes of American life - killers and cowboys, Hollywood and farmsteads, rock n' roll and the open road. He is, as Wynn Handman, the artistic director of the American Place Theatre once remarked in an interview with Newsweek, "like a conduit that digs down into the American soil and what flows out of him is what we're all about."

What often flows out of Shepard are characters and stories that are at once exciting and recognizable as American allegories as well as shocking and repulsive for what they tell us about human instinct and behavior, regardless of cultural background...