Sam Shepard is one of the most popular contemporary American playwrights, yet in Hungary barely more than a handful of people (except for scholars and academic circles) know his name, despite the fact that his most successful plays are available in Hungarian as well, thanks to Árpád Göncz and Mária Révész. The obscurity of Shepard is particularly intriguing if we consider his thematic occupa-tions: he is far from being elitist and abstract. The wide range of themes he deals with in his plays includes everyday problems like love, family and personal fulfillment (amongst others). As the reader can see, these are issues that everybody has to deal with at one point in their lives. What is more, they universally apply both to Americans, and Hungarians (and every other people in the wide world). This unexplainable anonymity of Shepard is exactly why I chose him (and my favorite play by him, Buried Child) to be the subject of the present thesis. I think that the key to un-locking the secret of Shepard’s unpopularity in Hungary lies in the text of his plays, or to be more precise, the way he conveys meaning in his plays. Shepard makes heavy use of realia, which results in a text that is deeply embedded in the American culture. In order to make bet-ter sense of Shepard’s culturally imbued texts, I think it necessary to familiarize oneself with the prime conveyors of culturally embedded meanings, namely realia.