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Dance the Eagle to Sleep
They call themselves the Indians. Shawn, a magnetic rock star; Corey, part Indian, whose heritage gave the movement its name; Billy, a brilliant young scientist; and Joanna, a pretty runaway "army brat" who survives on pot and sex. Through the experiences of four young revolutionaries, this macabre and moving adventure brings an all-too-possible future into shattering focus.
224 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
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About the author
Marge Piercy
113 books924 followersMarge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with 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," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) 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 of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) 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. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) 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 (1987) 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 a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.
An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with 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," she said in a 1984 interview.
As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) 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 of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) 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. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) 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 (1987) 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 a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
November 29, 2014
Grim and clear-eyed, Dance the Eagle to Sleep captures the political mood of the new left/counterculture of the late 1960s with a chilling precision. Following five teenagers from unfocused rebellion to open insurrection, the novel's part jeremiad, part dystopian speculative fiction. Piercy knows the conflicts from the inside; she's particularly good with the gender tensions (which she doesn't sentimentalize) and the split between political and cultural revolutionaries. She's not quite as good with race, but that, too, is a mirror of the moment. In a sharp introduction written in 2011 (the novel was published in 1970--I first read it because of a cover blurb from Thomas Pynchon), Piercy writes that it was in part her attempt to provide a picture of what it would be like if the US dealt with domestic resistance like it dealt with Vietnam. Not something I much wanted to think about, but there it is. I'll close with her quote on the coming of fascism to the U.S. and let you make whatever connections seem apt: "Some of the academic ex-radicals took the position that unrest among the youth would provoke fascism. They wrote about fascism as a dramatic change, a cop d'etat, the Pentagon marching on the White House. None of them imagined that it could come in like the morning paper, that it would be just the same families maintaining themselves in power by slightly different means. No swastikas, no eagles other than the Bald Eagle rendered extinct through DDT: only the American flag. No SS, no storm troopers, no blackshirts: only the regular police armed with tanks and gases and high explosives and trainging in riot control. They did not see that black people and kids already lived their lives in a police state."
November 19, 2016
Finished this book while on a plane to an organizing event while the world was melting down around me as election results trickled in. Powerful fiction that cut through sentimentality and had enough dystopic elements to be removed from reality, while also speaking devastating truths about the world we face and have been facing. All power to the people.
October 11, 2021
A very good early work for Marge Piercy. As always, incredibly insightful, with characters who feel so real. And yet ... What a strange book. It is all hard truths and sharp edges, people trying their best and believing that they are doing things for the best. So much more than a lot of more modern takes on YA, much deeper, much sharper - and this one would not pass as modern YA, too much sex, too much violence (but also this is what it is like to be 17, 18, 19). And yet something is off - and I am wondering whether this something is me, whether I may have given up on the power of books. A decade ago I would have loved this one. Or is it the world that has changed? Is it climate change and politics and the fact that Fridays for Future is both so powerful and so ignored? Are we long and far past the point of no return in the book ...?
June 10, 2009
This was even better that Woman on the Edge of Time, which is Piercy's best known novel. Dance the Eagle is about revolutionary struggle (got my attention), the challenge of building a movement, the why and how people get into activism, and it is told through personal narration of a small handful of counterpoint characters. Direct action, lifestyle-ism, mass movement, guerrilla tactics, primitivism and communalism all feature. Possibly the most interesting novel (ficion) of revolutionary struggle I've read yet.
May 27, 2022
This is the first in a series of books that I will be reading over the coming weeks after discovering a trove of old Thomas Pynchon blurbs--the little two liners written on the back of books in re-publications. I've never heard of this piece or of Marge Piercy, so this was a bit of a leap of faith. The plot is set in some unspecified dystopian future in the United States where a strict social caste system is in place. Groups of fed up teens around the country rebel and form "communes" and become hunted by the government. Just based on subject matter alone, I can see why Pynchon was impressed. There is much anti-authoritarian, anti-media, anti-materialist rhetoric present. The writing was surprisingly good, even scratching the surface of Pynchonian at times. Unfortunately (I feel like a broken record saying this), it's just too short for the lofty abstractions Piercy is trying to chase and the amount of characters that she attempts to integrate. This could have been very good at twice its 225 pages, and I still did really enjoy it, but I always want more. I'll check her out again, though.
May 26, 2020
Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
4.5/5
"In the turbulent 1960s, the radical socialist Students for a Democratic Society (1960-1974) were one of the most influential organizations in the nascent New Left. SDS’s 1962 political manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, proclaimed in idealized terms the importance of egalitarianism, participatory democracy, labor rights, Civil Rights, and nuclear disarmament. Marge Piercy (1935-) wrote her first SF novel Dance The Eagle to Sleep (1970) while working as an organizer with the SDS regional office in New York (biography). In the last years of the 60s, while she was writing the novel, she describes SDS devolving into “warring factions” and her own personal disillusionment as the Vietnam War raged on.
In this context, Dance The Eagle To Sleep (1970) can be read as the rise and fall—intense, ecstatic, meaningful, tempestuous—of an SDS-esque student-driven [...]"
4.5/5
"In the turbulent 1960s, the radical socialist Students for a Democratic Society (1960-1974) were one of the most influential organizations in the nascent New Left. SDS’s 1962 political manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, proclaimed in idealized terms the importance of egalitarianism, participatory democracy, labor rights, Civil Rights, and nuclear disarmament. Marge Piercy (1935-) wrote her first SF novel Dance The Eagle to Sleep (1970) while working as an organizer with the SDS regional office in New York (biography). In the last years of the 60s, while she was writing the novel, she describes SDS devolving into “warring factions” and her own personal disillusionment as the Vietnam War raged on.
In this context, Dance The Eagle To Sleep (1970) can be read as the rise and fall—intense, ecstatic, meaningful, tempestuous—of an SDS-esque student-driven [...]"
May 23, 2023
Marge Piercy's books have meant a lot to me. I'm now re-reading the ones I've read, and reading the ones I have not. This is one of the latter and oh, am I glad I found it. A dystopian take on the 70's, but it holds up to today. It's an astute analysis of leftist movements throughout time - visionary, committed, met by violent oppression, internal conflicts, individual struggles with indoctrination and liberation. It's not a quick read but it is engrossing and important.
October 6, 2020
Great! Thomas Pynchon is right. (Plus, it's got a Sorry to Bother You, Donnie Darko, William Gibson "Bridge" trilogy approach of, via science-fiction, varying a few elements, but not others!) It's neat and erotic and great!
Kudos!
Kudos!
October 18, 2022
At times the jumps in time between chapters can be jarring and lends a certain disconnection to the book as a whole, but all around this is an excellent dystopian novel, one more focused on the revolutionary cadre that could fight it than the broken world itself.
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September 27, 2022vivid but bleak. have a clear memory of reading this during a slow loft shift
April 9, 2025
wonderful writing filled with this undefinable, human energy. Devastatingly sad story. More true than not.
October 4, 2014
As an admirer of Marge Piercy's volume of work, from novels to memoirs, I was eager to read this earliest novel, "Dance the Eagle to Sleep: A Novel."
In her iconic style, she zeroes in on the young during an exploratory time in their lives, as they seek to free themselves from the strictures of ordinary society, to escape from the "boxes" in which they reside and the stilted mantra their parents perpetuate.
Our MCs are four teens caught up in a revolutionary fervor, and the story spotlights them one by one, in alternating perspectives, from Shawn (previously Sean) the rocker to the Native American Corey. Runaways are drawn to this fledgling group that expands as the zeal increases. Like Jill (Joanna) or Billy. As we examine their inner thoughts and feelings, through these individuals we come to understand their stories and their causes.
Through music, through dance, and ultimately through experimenting with their own structures, including a farm commune, they become their own persons.
Piercy is great at showing us what the "revolutionary world" of the sixties and seventies was all about. I enjoyed some of her later works a lot more, like "Small Changes." But I also liked this glimpse of her beginnings. 3.5 stars.
In her iconic style, she zeroes in on the young during an exploratory time in their lives, as they seek to free themselves from the strictures of ordinary society, to escape from the "boxes" in which they reside and the stilted mantra their parents perpetuate.
Our MCs are four teens caught up in a revolutionary fervor, and the story spotlights them one by one, in alternating perspectives, from Shawn (previously Sean) the rocker to the Native American Corey. Runaways are drawn to this fledgling group that expands as the zeal increases. Like Jill (Joanna) or Billy. As we examine their inner thoughts and feelings, through these individuals we come to understand their stories and their causes.
Through music, through dance, and ultimately through experimenting with their own structures, including a farm commune, they become their own persons.
Piercy is great at showing us what the "revolutionary world" of the sixties and seventies was all about. I enjoyed some of her later works a lot more, like "Small Changes." But I also liked this glimpse of her beginnings. 3.5 stars.
September 1, 2024
Another tour-de-force from Piercy. A story of young adult rebellion that feels (to me) like a thoughtful coda to the Students for a Democratic Society-Weatherman experience (c. 1962-70). Dance the Eagle to Sleep reads like Piercy working through what the New Left did and became (good and bad) through the end of the 1960s, which is fascinating to me. What Piercy does so well is avoid saccharine and simplicty. Her characters are complex with faults and strengths and righteousness that is just as often misplaced as not. But they are struggling. This is a book of and about the struggle.
I think I accidentally just read 2nd time. About 40 pages in it dawned on me that I may have read it before — which is fine; I've read Piercy's Vida 3 or 4 times.
I think I accidentally just read 2nd time. About 40 pages in it dawned on me that I may have read it before — which is fine; I've read Piercy's Vida 3 or 4 times.
May 22, 2016
Piercy is an incredible writer. This story is quite profound and intense -- it's the kind of novel that would have been too disturbing to enjoy reading, were it not written so well. The character development is really well done (and there are several primary characters to be developed).
My only two qualms (although not enough to detract from my 5-star rating) are that I became attached to some of the secondary characters at the beginning of the book who completely disappeared early on, and that the sexual content was more explicit than I think was necessary to tell the story.
My only two qualms (although not enough to detract from my 5-star rating) are that I became attached to some of the secondary characters at the beginning of the book who completely disappeared early on, and that the sexual content was more explicit than I think was necessary to tell the story.
August 9, 2016
This is a sad, almost tragic, tale of youthful dreams and ideals washed up on the shoals of the preceding generations' apathy, smashed on the rocks of the preceding generations' wars. Published nearly 50 years ago, the young revolutionaries will seem familiar to those of us who rode in on the first wave of the Baby Boom. Corey, Shawn, Billy (mystic, artist, warrior, respectively) are differing points of view across the landscape of capitalist America. Marcus, Ginny (black, female, respectively) different perspectives still.
August 24, 2012
Great insite into a group struggling for liberation during a time when race, class, gender, identity, and political war infiltrated every facet of americans' daily life. An intense journey of people who could not afford to close their eyes and obey. Strongly recommend for anyone who has been involved or interested in the history of freedom fighters and struggle in modern north america.
July 5, 2007
the story of an attempted commune that resists the government. of course it has a horrible ending bc communes never work out. interesting study of how even the most social-justice oriented ideologies can become oppressive and dogmatic.
December 31, 2018
PM Press, I like you, but someone really should have given this edition a good read before it went to the press--it's filled with OCR typos. Often I couldn't even figure out what the messed up word was supposed to be. Next time I want to read this book I'll just find one from the 70s online.
April 16, 2017
I love Marge Piercy's other books, but this one did not really appeal to me. Somewhat over-indulgent, and the characters were not very well rounded. This is a very early book -she definitely got better as she went along!
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews