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Buried Child
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Awards And Honors:
Pulitzer Prize
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Buried Child

play by Shepard
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History

Buried Child, three-act tragedy by Sam Shepard, performed in 1978 and published in 1979. The play was awarded the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Shepard had his first critical and commercial success with this corrosive study of American family life. The play, set on an Illinois farm, centres on the homecoming of Vince and his girlfriend, Shelly. Vince cherishes a romantic, bucolic vision of the home he left six years earlier, but the actual family turns out to be a collection of twisted grotesques.

Shepard considered the work to be part of a family trilogy with Curse of the Starving Class (1976) and True West (1981), both of which also portrayed destructive blood relationships.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.