Mike Davis is an American social commentator and urban theorist. He is best known for his investigations of class structures in his native Southern California.

Born in 1946 in Fontana, California, Davis' education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and SDS activist. He briefly studied at Reed College in the mid-1960s but did not begin his academic career in earnest until the early 1970s, when he earned BA and MA degrees in History from UCLA. (Though he passed the qualifying exams for his doctorate, UCLA's history department refused to accept what became City of Quartz as his dissertation.)

He currently teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

Major works

• Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (2003)
• Dead Cities: And Other Tales (2003)
• Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)
• Ecology of Fear (2000)
• City of Quartz (1990)

External links

LA Weekly profile, 1999