Description: "Sam Shepard was a true American original. A theater and film icon who lived life on a mythic scale, Shepard became an embodiment of the fierce independence and wild freedom of the American West. Taking us from the creative explosion of downtown New York City in the 1960s to Bob Dylan's legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour, from Hollywood backlots and film shoots in the Mojave Desert to the horse ranches where Shepard went to escape it all, Robert M. Dowling's biography reveals this playwright, actor, and filmmaker as we've never known him before"--
Brief description: Robert M. Dowling is professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. He is the author of Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem and the biography Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts, which was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for biography in 2015. He has also coedited the 2021 compendium of interviews Conversations with Sam Shepard. As an authority on American drama, he has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, among other media venues. He serves on the editorial board of The Eugene O'Neill Review and is an elected Board member of the Eugene O'Neill Society (President of the Society, 2018-2021).
Review Quotes: Praise for Robert M. Dowling's Eugene O'Neill
"Scrupulously researched and elegantly written . . . required reading for anyone in the theater." --Nathan Lane, The New York Times Book Review "A richly drawn portrait . . . As a biographer, Dowling is generous and inclusive." --Bookforum "[An] important story, perceptively recounted." --Washington Post