Recommendations
Books Like Buried Child
Best books to read after Buried Child by Sam Shepard
Readers who love Buried Child by Sam Shepard are drawn to its combination of American Gothic atmosphere, family secrets, mythic subtext, and the violence concealed beneath the surface of ordinary Midwestern life — they want plays and novels that deal with the American family secret, the myth of the family farm, and the darkness beneath the surface of the American story.
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True West
by Sam Shepard
The companion Shepard play — brothers Austin and Lee who gradually exchange identities over the course of the play. Both True West and Buried Child are explorations of American mythology: Buried Child investigates the myth of the family farm; True West investigates the myth of the American West and the violence it has domesticated
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Long Day's Journey into Night
by Eugene O'Neill
O'Neill's companion in the tradition of the American family confined together, whose secrets are progressively revealed — the Tyrones' terrible day. Both are the greatest American family plays about the secret at the center of the family: O'Neill's secret is Mary's addiction; Shepard's is a buried child and an incest the family cannot acknowledge
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A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams
Williams's companion in the tradition of the American Gothic family play — Blanche DuBois's arrival, the revelation of her past, her breakdown. Both A Streetcar Named Desire and Buried Child are organized around the arrival of an outsider (Blanche; Vince and Shelly) who forces the family to confront the secret that sustains it
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Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
The companion in the tradition of the American family secret — Thomas Sutpen's attempt to create a dynasty and the incest and fratricide at its center. Both are companion investigations of the American family secret (incest, illegitimacy, the buried crime the family's prosperity is built on) in different regional traditions: Faulkner in the South, Shepard in the Midwest
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Death of a Salesman
by Arthur Miller
The companion in the American theatrical tradition about the American Dream and what it conceals. Buried Child and Death of a Salesman are companion investigations of the American family as the site where the Dream's promises are made and broken: Miller's play is about the individual's self-deception; Shepard's about the family's collective concealment of a crime the Dream's mythology required them to bury
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A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
Hansberry's companion in the tradition of the American family play organized around a secret and the question of how to live with what the family knows — the Younger family and the tension between their different dreams. Both Buried Child and A Raisin in the Sun are organized around what the family has had to bury and what it means when that thing surfaces
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's companion in the tradition of the American literary investigation of the violence that underlies the American story — the Judge and the kid in the historical frontier. Both Blood Meridian and Buried Child investigate the American mythology of expansion: McCarthy shows the violence at the origin of the American conquest; Shepard shows the violence at the center of the Midwestern family that inherited it
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Winter's Bone
by Daniel Woodrell
Woodrell's companion in the tradition of the American literary investigation of rural poverty and the family secret — Ree Dolly's search for her missing father in Ozark meth country. Both are organized around a young person's attempt to find an answer that the community is organized to prevent, and both reveal a violence that the surface of rural American life conceals
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