Sam Shepard’s Soul — newyorker.com

After Amiri Baraka, Sam Shepard, who died last week, at the age of seventy-three, was this nation’s first hip-hop playwright. In astonishing early works like “The Tooth of Crime” (1972) and “Angel City” (1976), he merged his love of jazz and jazz culture with stories about impossible love affairs and male competitiveness and young people anxious to eat away at any chance of intimacy—all set in an America made real to its crookedly romantic inhabitants because of the movies, and sometimes real experience.

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