![]() ![]() With a career spanning half a century, Shepard wrote over 50 plays, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for Buried Child. He understood more than anyone how it felt to be trapped in one’s skin. I’ll bail you out.” With Sam I could be myself. I felt instantly confined by the notion that we are born into a world where everything is mapped out by those before us… When I told I sometimes had the impulse to put my foot through a window, he just said, “Kick it in, Patti Lee. She explained that there were unspoken rules of social behavior, and that’s the way we coexist as people. I remember passing shop windows with my mother and asking why people just didn’t kick them in. Whenever I think of Sam Shepard-his work and influence-I think of the way Patti Smith described him in her memoir, Just Kids: The Center also houses the papers, correspondences and notebooks of many influential writers of the 20 th century, including several boxes dedicated to Shepard-the Illinois-born cowboy-mouthed fool-for-love who would become one of the most prolific playwrights of his generation. At the time, I was driving through the Southwest with my husband on our honeymoon-a road trip largely inspired by Shepard’s collaboration with German filmmaker Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas, that would take us, two Australian ex-pats, 5,000 miles across the country from Los Angeles, back to our newly adopted home of Brooklyn, New York.Īs one of the foremost research facilities dedicated to arts and letters in the United States, the collection at the Harry Ransom Center is comprised of manuscripts, rare books and other literary curios, including Edgar Allen Poe’s writing desk and David Foster Wallace’s personal, annotated library. I viewed these papers in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin last summer, a week after Sam Shepard’s death that August at the age of 73. Between these pages, there is no separation between what makes up art and what makes up life. ![]() Taped inside the dirt-red cover of another-a business card for Ray E. In the back of one notebook, a photocopied review of Shepard’s 1983 play Fool for Love is folded up with an article about fly-fishing. There are guitar chords with Spanish lyrics, passages of prose that could be read as diary-entry confession or script, and unattributed quotations that might be lines picked-up from conversations overheard on the road or dialogue for a work-in-progress. In Sam Shepard’s notebooks there are lists of trees: cottonwood, dogwood, apricot, willow, polar, locust, crab apple, silver maple. ![]()
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