Texas State University in San Marcos is adding to their Whittliff Collectionson Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Academy Award-nominated actor Sam Shepard. The new Sam Shepard/Johnny Dark Correspondence Collection will include personal letters, photographs, taped conversations and a homemade film which documents the friendship between the two men over many years.
“It’s a very personal, intimate exchange of letters that really sheds a lot of light on Shepard’s personality as well as his work process as he’s produced many of his plays and put in many films,” Steve Davis, curator for the Whittliff Collections, told KUT.
The Whittliff Collections currently has an extensive archive donated by Shepard in the early 1990s that highlights the creative arc of his work process. The Shepard/Dark material adds the correspondence that enhances the current collection.
Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark have been friends for the last four decades and are working on a book together of their correspondence which will be published by the University of Texas Press in another year. Davis is hopeful that some of the new exhibit will be up by this fall for students and researchers to view.