Biography of Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy was born on March 31^st, 1936 to Bert Bernice Bunnin and Robert Douglas Piercy. She grew up in Detroit, and related to the era in which she lived, her and her family were affected by the Great Depression. They lived in a small house in a working-class neighborhood, which separated blacks and whites by blocks. Her grandfather was a union organizer, murdered while organizing bakery workers. She loved her grandmother very much, as she and her mother shared lots of stories with young Marge. Piercy gives credit to her mother for shaping her into a poet. She said that her mom was emotional, imaginative, superstitious, and a good story teller. Her mom told her to observe the world around her very closely, and remember what she gathered. As she grew into a teenager, Marge left home at just age 17, due to her and her mother fighting often. Before her mother died, she did restore the relationship. She wasn’t very close with her father, who died just 4 years after her mother.

Marge had a happy childhood. She had gotten the German measles when she was very young, and during that sick time, she read a lot. At 17, when she left her home, she ended with winning a scholarship to go to the University of Michigan. She was a very good student and was motivated to learn.

She was different because she felt as though she couldn’t fit the proper image of a woman that 1950’s Freudianism had set for her. She did, however, succeed in winning awards such as the Hopwood award, and many of them. The money she got from this gave her the advantage to travel to France after graduation. There, she met her first husband. The French, Jewish, particle physicist was kind and smart, but very demanding with expectations of conventional sex roles in marriage. He didn’t take her writing seriously, and ultimately, she left him. Piercy was extremely poor after this.

She moved to Chicago after the marriage ended, working various part-time jobs to get by. She was also involved in civil rights movements. She commented that during that time, those were her hardest lived years. Society had set this bar for women that was way too low. She continued to write various novels, but couldn’t seem to get them published. They were works of fiction with a political dimension, which included women who were working class people that were “not as simple as they were supposed to be.”

In 1962 she remarried to a computer scientist. This was more of an open relationship where people even lived with them. She moved with him to Cambridge, then to San Francisco, and then Boston. Piercy was heavily involved, at this time, with the VOICE, a Vietnam peace group located in Ann Arbor. She realized here, that the problem with her book, Going Down Fast was to feminist for people to actually enjoy. She rewrote the book in a male’s point of view. She also continued to write Dance the Eagle to Sleep. She wrote many books with a political twist.

In 1965, she began to get very sick. Her and her husband moved to New York and started more activist groups, but again, she was still very sick, so they moved to Cape Cod. Here, she spent a lot of time by herself, gardening and growing spiritually. Marge also spent a lot of time writing poetry. She divorced her husband in 1976.

In 1982, she married Ira Wood. She wrote a play with him, called The Last White Class, as well as a novel in 1998, Storm Tide. In 1997, together, they founded Leapfrog Press, a small literary publishing company.

Currently, she often goes on small tours for lectures, workshops, and readings. She loves reading and writing, and says she will and does continue to write, feeling that she is lucky because she can do so.