It will come as no surprise to those familiar with the dramatic works of Sam Shepard that he believes that “all good writing comes out of aloneness.” His plays are peopled with loners, renegades, and the pathologically independent. It might, however, cause some alarm to learn that he does a good deal of his writing while driving alone: “It's a good discipline because sometimes you can only write two or three words at a time before you have to look back at the road, so those three words have to count. The problem is whether you can read the damn thing by the time you reach your destination.” There are, of course, other problems, and the highway patrol would probably be very interested in Shepard's plate number, but the image of Shepard frantically writing while maneuvering the US Interstates is a fitting one for his three collections of nondramatic works, Hawk Moon (1981), Motel Chronicles (1982), and Cruising Paradise (1996). Many of the short stories, monologues, poems, and rantings, for lack of a better word, contain roadway imagery: characters hit the highway to leave or to return home, to lose or to find a job, or to drift. The focus on automotive imagery has led Robert Brustein to note, “Shepard may be the most inveterate chronicler of motel culture since Nabokov made Humbert Humbert chase Lolita through the backlots of America. (Both writers recognize that nothing better suggests the bleak rootlessness of American life than a rented room.)” And both recognize that nothing suggests the American ethos quite so well either - the frontier, the restlessness, the quest, and the fierce independence. As in his stage plays, the characters who inhabit these anthologies are dynamically desultory, sometimes searching for specific answers, and sometimes shifting identities as frequently as a truck driver shifts gears along the hills of Pennsylvania in the desperate hope to find a new persona that will result in understanding.