“I just dropped out of nowhere,” Sam Shepard said of his arrival in New York, at nineteen, in the fall of 1963. “It was absolute luck that I happened to be there when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting.” Shepard, a refugee from his father’s farm in California, had spent eight months as an actor travelling the country by bus with a Christian theatre troupe, the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players. Acting had been his ticket to ride; he’d been so scared at his Bishop’s Company audition that he’d recited the stage directions. “I think they hired everybody,” he said. Once he’d taken up residence in Manhattan—“It was wide open,” Shepard said. “You were like a kid in a fun park”—he proceeded to knock around the city, “trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.” He had no connections, no money (he sold his blood to buy a cheeseburger), and nothing to fall back on but his lanky, taciturn Western charisma. He did, however, have renegade credentials and a store of arcane knowledge: he had been a 4-H Club member, a sheepshearer, a racecourse hot walker, a herdsman, an orange picker, and a junior-college student.

Shepard was homespun and handsome, with a strong jaw and a dimpled chin. He exuded the mystery and swagger of a movie star, which he would eventually become. (In addition to writing four dozen or so plays—the latest of which, “Ages of the Moon,” opened last week, at the Atlantic Theatre Company—Shepard, who is now sixty-six, has appeared in some forty films; he was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the test pilot Chuck Yeager, in “The Right Stuff.”) But even as a new arrival in the city he seemed instinctively to understand the importance of image. “Use yer eyes like a weapon. Not defensive. Offensive,” a character in his play “The Tooth of Crime” (1972) says, adding, “You can paralyze a mark with a good set of eyes.” Shepard had such a pair. His almond-shaped blue eyes looked out at the world with wry detachment; they imposed on his passionate nature a mask of cool. His smile was tight-lipped—half knowing, half strategic (it hid a mouthful of craggy teeth). Years of living with invasive family aggression—“The male influences around me were primarily alcoholics and extremely violent,” he said—had taught Shepard to play things close to his chest: to look and to listen. “I listened like an animal. My listening was afraid,” Wesley, the son in Shepard’s 1978 play “Curse of the Starving Class,” says, describing his method for coping with his drunken father. Shepard was a man of few words, many of them mumbled. Compelling to look at but hard to read—at once intellectually savvy and emotionally guarded—he exuded the solitude and the vagueness of the American West.

Though Shepard lacked East Coast sophistication—he was poorly read in those days—he brought news of what he called “the whacked out corridors of broken-off America”: its blue highways, its wilderness, its wasteland, its animal kingdom, its haunted lost souls, its violence. “People want a street angel. They want a saint with a cowboy mouth,” a prescient character in one of Shepard’s early one-acts said. Shepard, it turned out, was the answer to those prayers. He got a job busing tables at the Village Gate, and began to write in earnest. “I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced,” he said. “There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer. . . . There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.” Ralph Cook, the Village Gate’s headwaiter, who was a former bit-part actor in Hollywood Westerns and a fellow-Californian, provided him an entry into the downtown scene through a new space he was starting on the Bowery—Theatre Genesis—where Shepard made his playwriting début, in 1964. By the following year, the twenty-two-year-old Samuel Shepard Rogers VII, who was known as Steve to his family and friends, had reinvented himself as Sam Shepard, whom the Times described as “the generally acknowledged ‘genius’ ” of the Off-Off-Broadway circuit.

Shepard’s early plays, written between 1964 and 1971, were full of surprises and assaults on the senses—people spoke from bathtubs or painted one another, colored Ping-Pong balls dropped from the ceiling, a chicken was sacrificed onstage. The plays express what Shepard called the “despair and hope” of the sixties; they act out both the spiritual dislocation and the protean survival instinct of traumatic times. Better than anyone else writing in that fractious hubbub, Shepard defined the fault lines between youth culture and the mainstream. “You were so close to the people who were going to the plays, there was really no difference between you and them,” he said, pinpointing both his work’s value and its limitation. The mockery, the role-playing, the apocalyptic fears, the hunger for new mythologies, and the physical transformations in his work gave shape to the spiritual strangulation of the decade—which, in Shepard’s words, “sucked dogs.” “For me, there was nothing fun about the sixties,” he said. “Terrible suffering. . . . Things coming apart at the seams.”

In their verbal and visual daring, Shepard’s early plays aspired to match the anarchic wallop of rock and roll. He had been playing drums since the age of twelve, when his father, a semi-professional Dixieland drummer, bought him a secondhand set and taught him how to play. (He continued drumming into his adulthood, with such bands as the Holy Modal Rounders and T Bone Burnett’s Void.) In his writing, he gravitated toward rock’s maverick energy; he listed Little Richard among his literary influences, along with Jackson Pollock and Cajun fiddles. (Later, he befriended Keith Richard, lived briefly with Patti Smith—“He was a renegade with nasty habits / he was a screech owl / he was a man playing cowboys,” she wrote of him—chronicled Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and co-wrote, with Dylan, the eleven-minute song “Brownsville Girl.”) In plays as varied as “The Tooth of Crime,” “Forensic & the Navigators” (1967), and “Operation Sidewinder” (1970), music and song are a crucial part of Shepard’s dramatic attack. Of these plays, “The Tooth of Crime,” which involves a style war between an old rock king, Hoss, and his upstart challenger, Crow, is the most visionary work. Here Shepard carried the language of drugs, rock, and political struggle from the street to the stage: