Click play to listen. Recorded on November 13, 2010.
The Festival is pleased to again host the presentation of the annual Chicago Tribune Literary Prize. The prize is part of the Chicago Tribune’s ongoing dedication to reading, writing, and ideas.
Sam Shepard looms over the last 45 years of the American theater like few other writers. His work draws equally from Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, rock ’n’ roll, film noir, pulp novels, and B movies. He is a pervasive and liberating influence on the theater, a visionary who has not only defined a style but has continually tested its limits.
Whether it is the surrealism plays like Cowboy #1 and #2; Cowboy Mouth written with Patti Smith; La Tourista, The Unseen Hand, The Tooth of Crime, The Curse of the Starving Class, or Tongues written with the Living Theatre’s Joe Chaikin; the hyperrealism of plays like True West, which launched and defined the careers of Steppenwolf’s John Malkovich and Gary Sinise; Buried Child, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize for drama; Fool For Love or Lie of the Mind; his work for the screen with collaborators as varied as Bob Dylan on Renaldo and Clara, Robert Altman on Fool for Love, Wim Wenders on Paris, Texas and Don’t Come Knocking, and Michelangelo Antonioni on Zabriske Point; or his recent collection of short stories, Day out of Days, all of Shepard’s works share a richness of language, brutal honesty, dramatic intensity, intelligent humor, sympathy for human weakness, roots in the American subconscious, and an unerring sense of what happens when you put the right people in a room and turn up the heat.
The author of over 40 plays, five collections of short stories and poems, and a memoir, Shepard is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and 11 Obie Awards, and was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.
All proceeds of this program will benefit the Chicago Tribune Holiday Campaign, a campaign of Chicago Tribune Charities, a McCormick Foundation Fund.
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