Mike Davis

Biography

Michael Ryan Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American Marxist historian, public intellectual, urban theorist, and writer based in Southern California. He was best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts, which connected political economy to social crises. His last two non-fiction books were Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (February 2022). Growing up in Fontana and Bostonia in California, Davis left school at age 16 to support his working-class family after his father suffered a heart attack. He later graduated as a valedictorian and won a scholarship to Reed College. There he struggled academically, but became heavily involved in student civil rights activism as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He spent a decade working as a truck driver and a organizer of left-wing political activism before returning to study economics and history at the University of California, Los Angeles on a union scholarship. He later worked at the Getty Research Institute and began writing seriously in the late 1990s. Davis would later teach as Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. He was an editor of the New Left Review, and wrote for a variety of British and American journals, including The Nation, the New Left Review, Jacobin, Socialist Review and the New Statesman. He won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007.

Bio from Wikipedia