"A penetrating new biography….not the first biography of Shepard, but it is finally the one that an artist of his stature deserves….Coyote also benefits from extensive access to Shepard’s intimates, who have avoided prior biographers, as well as to his journals and correspondence, which Dowling quotes to illuminating effect….[an] excellent biography." —The Atlantic

"The most complete portrait of Shepard’s life to date….Dowling is a discerning and sympathetic…guide through Shepard’s oeuvre." —Wall Street Journal

"Shepard…remains a constant presence in the theatre….Lately, there has been a flourishing of Shepard adaptations….In reading Robert M. Dowling’s striking new biography of Shepard, Coyote, I came to appreciate that these new writers are excavating currents already buried in Shepard’s bedrock." —The New Yorker

"Detailed and dramatic….[Dowling] analyzes individual plays while paying keen attention not only to their language and critical reception, but the circumstances of their writing and first performances… superb.” —Spectator World

"Exacting….Few biographers have so deftly connected the art surrounding Shepard to the art he made….Dowling's strength, as in his earlier Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts, lies in his ability to fuse literary criticism with biography…. Dowling writes with a dramatist's cadence, favoring the long sinuous sentence, the sudden aphorism….a biography that breathes, full of wind and motion." —Arkansas Democrat Gazette

"[Dowling] probes the connection between the playwright’s beguiling dramatic works and how they align to Shepard’s turbulent personal life...commendable." —Art Fuse

"Dowling illuminates Shepard’s creative evolution play by play, book by book, and film by film and tracks his painfully conflictful relationships with those he loved most….Dowling’s exceptionally fluent portrait-in-full vividly and indelibly conveys Shepard’s brilliance, fury, anguish, passion for nature, and hunger for expression, love, and freedom." —Booklist

"Shepard, the Bob Dylan of American Drama, had an almost unbelievably eventful life, and Robert M. Dowling’s essential biography illuminates every corner of it, while providing a wonderfully clear guide to Shepard’s tangled, massively influential body of work." —David Auburn, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

"Through a truly heroic level of research, and a keen critical read of Sam Shepard’s plays, novels, memoir, and films, Robert M. Dowling has crafted a portrait not just of a man, but of the multiple generations of American life during which Shepard was a defining artist. Coyote takes on the nearly impossible task of telling the life story of one of the most complicated men to ever lay hand to typewriter, and does it with aplomb, setting the dream life of his written work against the real life as he lived it." —Isaac Butler, author of The Method and The World Only Spins Forward

Praise for Robert M. Dowling’s Eugene O’Neill

"Scrupulously researched and elegantly written . . . required reading for anyone in the theater." —Nathan Lane, The New York Times Book Review

"A richly drawn portrait . . . As a biographer, Dowling is generous and inclusive." —Bookforum

"[An] important story, perceptively recounted." —Washington Post