Biographical Note
Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark met in New York City in the early 1960s. Dark married Scarlett Johnson, and Shepard married one of Scarlett’s daughters, O-Lan, with whom he had a son, Jesse Shepard. Over the next several years, the two couples lived together in Greenwich Village, Newfoundland, and California; and through the decades, Dark and Shepard have remained close friends. When distance separated them, they wrote letters back and forth, beginning with the Shepards’ stay in England in 1972, and then beginning in earnest in 1983 when Shepard left the family for a relationship with Jessica Lange, whom he had met on the set of Frances. Shepard’s son, Jesse, remained with the Darks in California, and Dark often accompanied Jesse on visits to his father.
The friendship and letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark are the subject of a documentary by Director Treva Wurmfeld (Shepard and Dark, 2012), and their collection of letters are published by The University of Texas Press in Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark (2013).
Scope and Contents
These materials constitute a part of the Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark Collection.
The Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark Collection spans 1972-2011 and documents the men’s forty-plus year friendship. The collection is arranged in five series: Correspondence, Dialogues, Photographs, Audio Material, and Video Material.
Series IV: Audio Material contains 28 tapes of varying audio quality. Most of the tapes feature conversations between Shepard and Dark - some recorded in person, some over the telephone. The tapes from the 1970s and 1980s form the basis of Dark’s typescript, Dialogues, in Series II. All of the cassettes have been digitized, and there are listening copies available. Archives staff have provided summaries of many, but not all, of the digitized tapes.