The problem with concluding a book of this sort is knowing where to stop. In 1996, even as I have been making final adjustments to this text, there has been a whole new burst of activity from Shepard. In April, Steppenwolf's revised Buried Child began a critically acclaimed, if commercially unsuccessful, run on Broadway. May saw the publication of a remarkable new collection of prose writing, Cruising Paradise. When the World Was Green: A Chef's Fable, a brand-new play by Shepard and Joseph Chaikin, had its premiere performances at the Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta in July, before reopening in New York in late fall, as part of a season of Shepard's work being mounted by the Signature Theatre Company (both productions were directed by Chaikin himself). The Signature season opened in November with an updated and overhauled version of The Tooth of Crime.

Although I am unable to deal with this new burst of activity in any detail here, it seems somehow appropriate that Shepard's output appears to be accelerating again just at the point that I am rounding this book off: as was stressed at the outset, I have no interest in trying to provide a finished judgment on a fixed body of work. Suffice to say that each of the new pieces suggests a further maturing of Shepard's writing, although in his case, as has been previously noted, “maturity” does not necessarily equate with greater accessibility.