Best Shepard
Freedom 7 was the spacecraft used in NASA's Mercury-Redstone 3 mission, launched on May 5, 1961. Piloted by astronaut Alan Shepard, the mission made him the first American to travel into space. The suborbital flight lasted roughly 15 minutes, reaching an apogee of 116 miles before splashing down in...
This monologue occurs near the climax of "Buried Child," a 1978 play by Sam Shepard that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Spoken by the family patriarch Dodge, the speech reveals a dark secret that has haunted the family's Illinois farmhouse for decades. He confesses to the infanticide of a child b...
This monologue is delivered by the character Austin in Sam Shepard's 1980 play True West. In the context of the play, Austin describes hearing coyotes howling at night in the suburban landscape of Southern California. The speech contrasts the artificiality of modern domestic life with primal, untame...
