Mike Davis (scholar)

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Michael Ryan Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American public intellectual, urban theorist, writer, and Marxist historian 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...

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