Mike Davis

Mike Davis (1946-2022) was a legendary modern American historian, self-described urban theorist, and political activist. His 1998 book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster is a prescient commentary on capitalism’s role in the rise of natural disasters in California. The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005) describes the impact of economic disparity during pandemics. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), Dead Cities and Other Tales (2002), Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class (2006), and, with Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (2020) each addressed in new ways the most pressing problems facing our nation. Davis’s writing appeared regularly in The Nation, The New Left Review, and Jacobin. A distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, Davis received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1998 and won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007