Born in 1943, Sam Shepard was the youngest of nine children. His father, Raymond, ran a gas station and a grocery store in Springfield, Missouri. He became a writer and director of plays. His mother, Mary Jane, was a nurse and taught at the University of Missouri
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Sam attended Springfield's Central High School, where he became involved in theater as well as sports. After graduating from high school in 1961, he went to the University of Texas at Austin and became involved with the creative writing program there. He served as creative director for the university's student newspaper and won a scholarship to attend the William Inge Academy of Dramatic Art in New York City.
He dropped out after six months and took a job as an intern at Hill & Knowlton public relations firm. Shepard left New York City for New Mexico, where he met his future wife, actress Jessica Tandy (daughter of Oscar-winning actress Ruby Dee). They married in 1965 and had two sons: Walker (born 1968) and Speed (born 1971).
They divorced in 1972. Shepard returned to New York City to pursue his writing career. In the early 1970s he worked as an actor on Broadway and formed a short-lived theater company called The Rattlestick Players.
In 1977 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant for "creative work that advanced human understanding." In 1978 he received his first Tony Award nomination for Best Play for Buried Child, which was followed by nominations for Best Director and Best Play for True West (1979) and Days Without End (1981). In 1983 he joined the faculty at Yale Drama School as a professor of playwriting. In 1985 he became artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where he directed fourteen plays over five seasons.
He also founded the Center for Fiction at that time and served as its first director. In 1987 his play Fool For Love received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Best Play. That year also saw the publication of his memoir Personal History: A Memoir by Sam Shepard published by Random House/Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; it was followed by another memoir, True West: A Play About Two Men One Horse And Their Pursuit Of Life's Simple Joys And Pleasures (1989), which was named one of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 1989; The Evening Star (1990), which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award (1990) and Los Angeles Times Award (1990) for fiction; Fool For Love (