Born on 31 March 1936, Marge Piercy grew up in inner-city Detroit within a patriarchal working-class family. Her father, Robert Douglas Piercy, who was born into a Presbyterian family but observed no religion, came from Welsh-English stock, grew up in a soft-coal mining town in Pennsylvania. He worked for Westinghouse all his adult life but was laid off for a year and a half during the Depression. Piercy's mother, Bert Bernice Bunnin Piercy, grew up in poverty and never finished the tenth grade. She taught her daughter to observe closely, value curiosity, and love books, fostering in her the characteristics that Piercy claims made her a poet and writer of fiction.
Piercy was particularly fond of her maternal grandmother, Hannah Bunnin Adler, who remarried some years after her first husband was murdered. Hannah Adler was born in Lithuania, the daughter of a rabbi; it was she who gave her granddaughter the Jewish name Marah and who, along with Marge's mother, brought her up in the Jewish faith, a heritage Percy affirms throughout her work. Piercy has one sibling--Grant Courtade, her mother's son by a previous marriage, who is fourteen years her senior.
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