Sam Shepard was a complicated man. Capturing his persona and making a clear narrative out of his mercurial life are not easy tasks ... What Robert Greenfield’s new biography, True West, achieves in its finest pages is placing the artist in his time. Greenfield recounts the ebb and flow of Shepard’s growth as a playwright, and chronicles how the fame and adulation from his life as a movie actor both propelled and thwarted his gifts as a writer. The book is especially successful at bringing the reader into the world that Shepard inhabited as he developed into one of the greatest American dramatists of the late 20th century ... The biography dives deepest into this time period, and I hope it will inspire others (as it inspired me) to reread his early plays. They are magnificent in their originality, playfulness and sheer rock-and-roll sensibility ... In his long life there is much to gossip about, and the biography avoids most of the sordid details that might have preoccupied a less serious biographer. Thankfully, Greenfield focuses on the life of Shepard the artist ... It’s a curious experience to read a biography of someone you knew written by someone who did not know them. I opened this book eager to find out how a more objective observer would view and summarize such an elusive man’s life ... But the man remains essentially inscrutable, as if we are cross-examining him from the distance of a drone — we learn where and when he went, but we have no idea why. And that is probably the way Sam Shepard would have liked it.

Judge a party not by who’s there, the old credo goes, but by who isn’t. The missing voices include those of O-Lan Jones, Shepard’s first wife; his longtime partner, Jessica Lange; his lovers Patti Smith and Brooke Adams and Joni Mitchell ... Greenfield’s book is faithful to Shepard’s life, while it skips like a stone along the surface. Shepard spent much time laying down cover, and tending to his own mythology ... Greenfield is a prolific journeyman biographer who has written the lives of Jerry Garcia, Bill Graham, Timothy Leary and Burt Bacharach, among others. His Shepard book lacks a certain density, and a critical sensibility, but it’s well organized and cleanly written. It neatly covers the bases ... Shepard’s is a hard life to screw up, and Greenfield doesn’t. His writing about the playwright’s final years is detailed and moving.

Without lacking respect for Shepard’s talent or personal struggles, Mr. Greenfield deconstructs a few of the Shepard myths ... Mr. Greenfield is at his best describing the artistic ferment of the 1960s and what John Lahr calls "the fractious early seventies," when Shepard finally took a play uptown ... Sam Shepard does not emerge from these pages as an especially likable man; his tortured plays came from a tortured sensibility. Mr. Greenfield honors his subject’s memory by refraining from easy judgments.

To organize Shepard’s sprawling creative life and to connect the art to his own tormented emotional struggle for authenticity, a biographer needs to impose some kind of overriding narrative vision on the work and on the psychology of the man. Robert Greenfield’s True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times doesn’t have the candlepower to do the job ... Greenfield won’t risk interpretation of Shepard’s plays or his psychology. As a result, his over 400-page account reads like a kind of travel itinerary, naming the high spots but giving no real sense of detail ... Greenfield’s book looks directly at Shepard and misses him by a mile.

The nexus between playwright, actor, and fiction writer Sam Shepard’s life and art is intricate. His dozens of radical, unnerving, wildly imaginative, raging, sorrowful, and mordantly funny plays and stories are spiked with family trauma, autobiography, and mythologizing. Previous biographies have tracked this dynamic, but seasoned biographer Greenfield is the first to fully chronicle Shepard’s entire, tempestuous, endlessly creative life ... Sardonic, haunted, brilliant, and elusive, Shepard needed to be free and loved, while his dramatic quest was at once personal, reflective of the times, and steeped in humankind’s ceaseless paradoxes.

The author accomplishes his biographical investigation without diminishing Shepard’s legacy as one of America’s greatest playwrights. A masterful look at the wild life of an enigmatic artist that shows how captivating the truth can be.

Riveting ... Greenfield doesn’t shy away from the less savory aspects of Shepard’s character, such as the marginalization of women in his work, and the keen attention to Shepard’s psychology makes for an illuminating portrait of a larger-than-life figure. Few readers will leave being unimpressed with Shepard, or this biography.