الفهرس 
Curse of the starving classOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Sam Shepard _ born on 5 November 1934 in Illinois, America - is a
product of the post-World War II era .This era in America was one of
disintegration which manifested itself mainly in the decline and fall of
the institution of the family. Like many sons in this era, Shepard
suffered from familial disorders that brought him to leave to New York,
in 1963 , where he started his writing career.
Shepard’s dramatic output can be divided into three phases. The
early plays, mostly one-act plays, were presented from the year 1964 to
the early 1970s .They include The Rock Garden (1964) , Cowboys
(1964), La Turista (1967) , and the revised Cowboys # 2 (1967) . These
plays are hallucinatory plays, filled with strange images and sounds and
inhabited with fantastic characters separated from their reality. They are
concerned mainly with presenting human cases undergoing psychic
agitation. In all these plays, there is always a young man appearing out
of touch with his surroundings whether because of the decline of culture,
the lack of understanding among the members of the family, or the loss of
the sense of identity. In the middle period of his writing, Shepard is keen
on dramatizing the condition of the artist. He portrays the artist as being
dehumanized by society, subject to public rejection and hard, destructive
criticism. Thus he suffers loneliness and isolation, and seeks death to get
red of his torturing life . However, Shepard proves that the true artist
never dies, as he lives through his artistic work. One prominent feature
of the plays belonging to this phase is the use of music as a dramatic
technical device . Of these plays are Operation Sidewinder (1970) ,
Suicide in B-Flat (1976) , and The Tooth of Crime (1972) . In 1977 ,
Shepard’s drama took another direction . The focus has become the
family. Shepard has written a string of five plays about the American
family: Curse of the Starving Class (1977) ; Buried Child (1978) , for
which he won the pulitzer prize; True West (1980) , Fool for Love
(1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985). All these plays deal with the theme
of the disintegration of the family ties. They pOltray the alienation, the
violence, and the lack of love and understanding , that have become
the basic features of the American family of today. However, What does
distinguish these plays, in my opinion, is the characters of the family
members.
The characters in the family plays are of a unique nature. They are
”bits and pieces” ; all are fractured and fragmented. The fragmentation of
the characters is attributed to the fact that comlption is deep set into their
families . Through his characters in the family plays, Shepard aims to