Sam Shepard has today achieved the status of a kind of American cultural icon, so much so that the lead singer of the hugely successful rock band U2 felt justified in citing him as a guru to explain their global stadium tour, ZooTV (Hewson's comments are a rather loose paraphrase of remarks made in Interview magazine in 1988). Yet it is one of the supreme contradictions of Shepard's career that he has reached such dizzy heights on the strength of playing supporting roles in a collection of films, few of which are more than mediocre, and writing a somewhat larger collection of plays, few of which are even remotely familiar to the general public. Another contradiction is that even the academic sector, one of the few areas where the importance of those plays is widely recognized, has produced remarkably little of critical substance to explain why they are worthy of attention.

This book attempts to rectify that situation somewhat, by advancing a sustained critical argument in relation to the development of Shepard's playwriting over the course of his career.