This collection shares decades of correspondence between the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and one of his closest friends—including personal photos.

One of America’s leading dramatists, as well as an accomplished actor, screenwriter, and director, Sam Shepard’s legacy includes immortal plays like True West and Buried Child, as well as memorable film roles, including his Academy Award-nominated performance in The Right Stuff. Though Shepard remained an intensely private man, he wrote candidly about his life and work in letters to his close friend Johnny Dark. His former father-in-law, Dark became a surrogate brother to Shepard, and even an artistic muse. Two Prospectors gathers nearly forty years of correspondence and transcribed conversations between them.

In these letters, the men open themselves to each other with gripping honesty. Shepard’s letters give us the deepest look we will ever get into his personal philosophy and creative process, while in Dark’s letters we discover insights into Shepard’s character that only an intimate friend could provide. The writers also reflect on the books and authors that stimulate their thinking, their relationships with women (including Shepard’s anguished decision to leave his wife and son for actress Jessica Lange), personal struggles, and accumulating years.

Motel Chronicles reveals the fast-moving and sometimes surprising world of the man behind the plays that have made Sam Shepard a living legend in the theater.

Shepard chronicles his own life birth in Illinois, childhood memories of Guam, Pasadena and rural Southern California, adventures as ranch hand, waiter, rock musician, dramatist and film actor. Scenes from this book form the basis of his play Superstitions, and of the film (directed by Wim Wenders) Paris, Texas, winner of the Golden Palm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

" . . . essential reading. A scrapbook of short stories, autobiographical reveries, poetry and photographs, Motel Chronicles is full of verbal delights, as well as insights into its author's entire canon. Whether Mr. Shepard is reminiscing about his parents or daydreaming about cherished movies and cars of his youth, he speaks in pungent and ethereal language that remakes our West. Read in conjunction with the plays, Motel Chronicles also helps demystify the origins of Mr. Shepard's psychological obsessions and desolate frontier iconography."—Frank Rich, New York Times

"If plays were put in time capsules, future generations would get a sharp-toothed profile of life in the U.S. in the past decade and half from the works of Sam Shepard."—Time

"Sam Shepard is a shaman—a New World shaman. Sam is as American as peyote, magic mushrooms, Rock and Roll, and medicine bundles."—Jack Gelber

Sam Shepard (1943) is a playwright, actor, author, screen writer and director whose work is performed on and off Broadway and in other theaters across the country. In 1979, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Buried Child. In 1983, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in The Right Stuff. His other famous works include True West, A Lie of the Mind and Curse of the Starving Class. Fool For Love & the Sad Lament of Pecos Bill by Sam Shepard was also published by City Lights Publishers.

In Fool For Love, situated at a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert, transient lovers May and Eddie spin around in a room in a relentless struggle for power and truth. Through recollections and dreams, multiple versions of a fierce and fatal love story are told.

The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife, another kind of love story in the form of a comic operetta, takes a distaff view of the Southwest's legendary cowpuncher and his mate Slue-foot Sue, with irreverent commentary on American heroes and heroics.

"No one knows better than Sam Shepard that the true American West is gone forever, but there may be no writer alive more gifted at reinventing it out of pure literary air." -Frank Rich, The New York Times

"Mr. Shepard is the most deeply serious humorist of the American theater, and a poet with no use whatever for the 'poetic.' He brings fresh news of love, here and now, in all its potency and deviousness and foolishness, and of many other matters as well." -Edith Oliver, The New Yorker

Sam Shepard (1943) is a playwright, actor, author, screen writer, and director whose work is performed on and off Broadway and in other theaters across the country. In 1979, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Buried Child. In 1983, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in The Right Stuff. His other famous works include True West, A Lie of the Mind, and Curse of the Starving Class.