Sam Shepard was renowned as one of America's most accomplished playwrights well before he gained celebrity as a film star. No native dramatist since O'Neill has probed so deeply the core of American pop mythology and set it on a collision course with the realities of American life. Buried Child explores the inner tensions of a rural existence, father-son relationships, and the place women hold in an increasingly ambiguous domestic atmosphere. Starkly poetic, humorous, and mysterious, Buried Child is a vision of a dysfunctional family transformed into a symbol of America's loss of innocence. The work earned its author a Pulitzer Prize in 1979.