In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculture—a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist-anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re-creation of the nation’s political and social soul, Coyote and his companions soon became power players. In prose both graphic and unsentimental, Coyote reveals the corrosive side of love that was once called “free”; the anxieties and occasional terrors of late-night, drug-fueled visits of biker gangs looking to party; and his own quest for the next high. His road through revolution brought him to adulthood and to his major role as a political strategist: from radical communard to the chairman of the California Arts Council, from a street theater apprentice to a motion-picture star. " Sleeping Where I Fall is the eloquent record of Peter Coyote's personal journey through a fascinating period in American history. Beyond his personal story, Coyote documents that time and its participants as few others have." — San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner " Sleeping Where I Fall chronicles with uncommon honesty a chaotic social movement that aimed to radically reform American society . . . the tales that make the final cut in Coyote's memoir are skillfully rendered, mixing hilarity and tragedy." — Los Angeles Times "No less than the social experiments it documents, Sleeping Where I Fall is an honest contribution to the exercise in freedom that Americans call their 'lifestyle.'" — Village Voice "Peter Coyote's shrewdly observant, cogently analytic and earthily detailed memoir of his years within the counterculture opens a door in 1998 and walks through it into the 1960s . . . Coyote reflects with maturity on the mistakes he and his peers made, but he affirms that the dream was worth having." — Washington Post An ordained practitioner of Zen Buddhism and a politically engaged actor, Peter Coyote began his work in street theater and political organizing in San Francisco. In addition to acting in over 140 films, and working with directors such as Martin Ritt, Steven Spielberg and Roman Polanski, Coyote has won an Emmy for narrating the award–winning documentary "Pacific Century." He has also narrated "The West, " "The Dust Bowl," "Prohibition," and "The Roosevelts" for Ken Burns. In 1993 he was awarded a Pushcart Prize for "Carla's Story," published in Zyzzyva . He lives in Mill Valley, California. “One of the defining attributes of the sixties was the collective impulse to reveal yourself candidly and publicly, confessing your inner visions as your daily life. It was as if the participants at a costume ball suddenly found the event too silly and simultaneously dropped their masks. Farm boys from Nebraska were writing poems, preppy girls from Grosse Point were throwing the Tarot and studying herbs. . . . Personal style counted more than a pedigree.” “The Digger idea of life acting was a kind of mental nuclear fuel, and before it was diluted into the weak tea of lifestyle (which came to mean spend any way you choose), the concept galvanized our community.” “I reviewed my life choices up to that point, reviewed my friends with sallow skin, nicotine-stained fingers, and bad teeth. For all our brilliant social invention and hipness, were we healthy ? What did freedom and liberation mean without freedom from illness? I had lots of time to ponder because my speculations concerning limitless invention had finally collided head on with their first inalienable limit: the integrity of the body. Abuse of it had flattened me like foolscap.” “We descend into the gullies, wind through the Live and Chinquapin oaks draped with Spanish moss, and climb to the large field leading directly to the house where we once played football against the Red House. But there is nothing there to stop the eye: no house, no barn, no outbuildings—nothing but whispering grass. . . . I cannot conceive how such a flamboyant people—Emmett, Elsa, Sweet William, Moose, Gristle, Carla, J.P. Bryden, Billy Batman, and Sam—people so visible in the moment, can be invisible to history, can have left no indelible mark. This book, if it is anything, is my attempt at carving a petroglyph, at creating some record of the tribes of free people who passed through here, along with the now unseen sides of myself, into that invisible half of the smoky moon.”