Dance marathons figured prominently in the U.S. during the Great Depression as a form of popular entertainment. Spurred on by the unappeasable anxiety and social discontent during the Great Depression, American public became fascinated by the trenchant will and human endurance that dance marathons seemed to display. By valorizing the constant motion and human endurance under the hardship, however, dance marathons acquire sociocultural meanings in the sense that they functioned as a symbolic ritual which seems to exorcise the Depression era’s fear of idling and unemployment. This paper analyzes sociocultural meanings of dance marathons dramatized by Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and James T. Farrell’s 1935 novel, Studs Lonigan as well as Farrell’s essay about dance marathons to illustrate how dance marathons were positioned within the larger socioeconomic circumstances. I will then extrapolate dance marathons to the current discourses of indebted existence under governmentality and neoliberalism, using Lazzarato’s concept of the indebted man as a primary reference point.