Reading Order
Buried Child Reading Order
Buried Child (1978) by Sam Shepard is the most important American play of the 1970s — the Midwestern farm family: Dodge (the alcoholic grandfather), Halie (his wife), their sons Tilden and Bradley, and the arrival of Vince (Tilden's son) with his girlfriend Shelly, who doesn't recognize the family that should recognize him. The play is organized around a secret that the family shares and that Vince's arrival makes impossible to continue ignoring: a child was buried in the backyard corn field, Tilden keeps bringing in vegetables that grew from that field despite the fact that the field has been fallow for years, and the secret of the buried child is the secret of the family's collapse. Shepard won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child in 1979. The play is in the tradition of the Southern Gothic (O'Neill, Williams) but set in the American Midwest, and it is the most important American theatrical investigation of the myth of the family farm and the violence that the myth conceals.
Where to start
Buried Child (1978) — the complete play. Shepard revised the play extensively for a 1996 revival, and both versions are available; the revised version clarifies some of the play's more obscure moments while losing some of the original's rawness. Best Sam Shepard reading order: Buried Child → True West → Fool for Love → A Lie of the Mind → Simpatico
Complete Buried Child Book List
- 1Buy
Buried Child
Sam Shepard·1978·The most important American play of the 1970s — Dodge, Halie, Tilden, Bradley, and the arrival of Vince and Shelly on the Midwestern farm. Won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; the play that established Shepard as the foremost American playwright of his generation - 2Buy
True West
Sam Shepard·1980·The companion Shepard play — the brothers Austin (a screenwriter housesitting their mother's California home) and Lee (a petty criminal in from the desert), who gradually exchange identities over the course of the play. True West and Buried Child are companion explorations of American mythology: Buried Child investigates the myth of the family farm and the violence it conceals; True West investigates the myth of the American West and the violence it has domesticated - 3Buy
Long Day's Journey into Night
Eugene O'Neill·1956·O'Neill's companion in the tradition of the American family confined together, whose secrets are progressively revealed — the Tyrones' terrible day. Long Day's Journey into Night and Buried Child are the two greatest American family plays about the secret at the center of the family: O'Neill's family's secret is Mary's morphine addiction and the failures of the past; Shepard's family's secret is a buried child and an incest that the family cannot acknowledge - 4Buy
A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams·1947·Williams's companion in the tradition of the American Gothic family play — Blanche DuBois's arrival at her sister's apartment, the revelation of her past, her breakdown. A Streetcar Named Desire and Buried Child are companion investigations of the American family's concealed violence: both are organized around the arrival of an outsider who forces the family to confront the secret that sustains it - 5Buy
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner·1936·Faulkner's companion in the tradition of the Southern Gothic family secret — Thomas Sutpen's attempt to create a dynasty and the revelation of the incest and fratricide at its center. Absalom, Absalom! and Buried Child are companion investigations of the American family secret (incest, illegitimacy, the buried crime that the family's prosperity is built on) in different regional traditions: Faulkner in the South, Shepard in the Midwest - 6Buy
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller·1949·The companion in the American theatrical tradition of the play about the American Dream and what it conceals — Willy Loman's self-deception and its consequences. 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 that the Dream's mythology has required them to bury - 7Buy
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy·1985·McCarthy's 1985 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. Blood Meridian and Buried Child are companion investigations of the American mythology of the frontier and the family farm: McCarthy shows the violence at the origin of the American conquest of the West; Shepard shows the violence at the center of the Midwestern family that inherited that conquest - 8Buy
Winter Bone
Daniel Woodrell·2006·Woodrell's 2006 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 the Ozark methamphetamine country. Winter's Bone and Buried Child are companion investigations of the American rural family under economic pressure: 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
Buried Child — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the buried child in Buried Child by Sam Shepard?
The buried child is the literal secret at the center of the play: a child who was drowned and buried in the backyard of the family farm. The play implies (but never states explicitly) that the child was born of the incestuous relationship between Dodge and his daughter-in-law Halie (or, in some readings, between Tilden and his mother Halie), and that Dodge drowned the child because he could not bear the evidence of what had happened. The buried child is never given a name, never clearly identified, and the play refuses to resolve the ambiguity about who its parents were. What matters is not the specific identity of the buried child but what it represents: the crime that the family has organized itself around concealing, the secret that the family's apparent normality (the farm, the family structure, the routines of domestic life) is built on covering up. When Tilden brings the corn from the 'fallow' field and finally carries the body of the buried child out of the ground at the play's end, the exhumation is both literal and symbolic: the secret that the family has buried is coming back to the surface, and the family's ability to maintain its concealment is over.
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