Marge Piercy


Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. Her work includes Woman on the Edge of Time; He, She and It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone to Soldiers, a New York Times Best Seller, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II. Piercy's work is rooted in her Jewish heritage, social and political activism, and her feminist ideals. She influenced the Women's Movement through both her writing and her unconventional life.

Life

Family and early life

Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Bert Piercy and Robert Piercy. While her father was presbyterian, she was raised Jewish by her mother and maternal grandmother who gave Piercy the Hebrew name of Marah.
On her childhood and Jewish identity, Piercy said: “Jews and blacks were always lumped together when I grew up. I didn’t grow up ‘white.’ Jews weren't white. My first boyfriend was black. I didn't find out I was white until we spent time in Baltimore and I went to a segregated high school. I can't express how weird it was. Then I just figured they didn't know I was Jewish.”
An indifferent student in her early childhood, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with the German measles and rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see".

Education

Upon graduation from Mackenzie High School, Piercy became the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan where she received a B.A. degree in 1957. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France. She earned a M.A. from Northwestern University in 1958.

Adulthood

After graduating college, Piercy and her first husband went to France, then returned to the United States. They divorced when Piercy was 23. Living in Chicago, she supported herself working various part time jobs while unsuccessfully trying to get her novels published. It was during this time that Piercy realized she wanted to write fiction that focused on politics, feminism, and working-class people. During her second marriage, Piercy became involved in the organization Students for a Democratic Society. In 1968, Piercy's first book of poetry, Breaking Camp, was published, and her first novel was accepted for publication that same year.

Personal life and relationships

At a young age Marge Piercy was married to her first husband, who was a French Jewish physicist. However, the marriage failed when she was 23 because of his expectations of gender roles in marriage. In 1962 she married her second husband, Robert Shapiro, a computer scientist. They divorced, and Piercy married her current husband, Ira Wood. She and her husband live in Wellfleet, MA. Piercy designed their home, where the couple have been living since the 1970s.

Activism

Piercy was involved in the civil rights movement, New Left, and Students for a Democratic Society. She is a feminist, environmentalist, marxist, social, and anti-war activist.
In 1977, Piercy became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press, an American nonprofit publishing organization that works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.

Writing

Piercy is the author of more than seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon Is Always Female and The Art of Blessing the Day. She has published fifteen novels, one play, one collection of essays, one non-fiction book, and one memoir. She contributed the pieces "The Grand Coolie Damn" and "Song of the Fucked Duck" to the 1970 anthology , edited by Robin Morgan.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during modern times. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk, as Piercy mentions in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass itself postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone to Soldiers follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone to Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in the third person after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often centered on feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to social change—what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world. It is rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.

Works

Novels