How to Carve a Boomer Mount Rushmore

For someone who was famously averse to publicity and whose work is often eclipsed in popular consciousness by being “that one guy in that one movie” — a tall, dark, and stoic Wallace Shawn — actor and playwright Sam Shepard lives on in a mountain of copy. In True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times, Robert Greenfield has scaled the mountain only to add another layer to it, with little promise of being able to distinguish it from all the layers below.