He was yesterday’s idea of a modern man: strong but vulnerable, brooding until he had something profound to say, deeply flawed but right when it counted. Shepard’s plays are full of anxiety, uncertainty, violence, and the raw friction that pushes men and women, fathers and sons, further away from each other in the grappling match of family life. How does Shepard’s version of manhood look now that he’s gone and the era of the embittered, rage-prone MAGA male has arrived? One insight comes early in a penetrating new biography, Coyote: The Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard, when the author, Robert M. Dowling, asserts, “Fear is the guiding principle of Shepard’s work”—fear of specters such as failure, heredity, and abandonment. A key difference between a man like Shepard and today’s dismal exemplars of hypermasculinity is that his currency was guilt, whereas now the watchword is resentment. The former internalizes blame, forging stoics, while the latter assigns it elsewhere, yielding brats. Shepard was open about his fears and spent his life trying to understand them. He did not sharpen them into weapons to use on others.