迈克·戴维斯

迈克·瑞安·戴维斯（Michael Ryan Davis，1946年3月10日-2022年10月25日）是一位美国作家。他自称自己是一位国际社会主义者和“马克思主义环保主义者”。 他曾是新左翼评论的编辑，他的文章曾登上英国社会主义工人党的喉舌月刊社会主义评论以及国家、雅各宾以及新政治家 。 他于1991年获得多伊彻纪念奖 ，1998年获得麦克阿瑟奖。他因食道癌去世，享年76岁。

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 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.

Biography

Background and childhood

Michael Ryan Davis was born in Fontana, California, on March 10, 1946, to Dwight and Mary (née Ryan) Davis. Dwight was from Venedocia, Ohio, and was of Welsh and Protestant background. He was a trade-union Democrat and an "anti-racist," which Davis attributed to his ancestors, Welsh abolitionists and Union soldiers who had settled in the Black Swamp of Ohio. Mary was an Irish Catholic from Columbus, Ohio, and the daughter of Jack Ryan, a veteran of the Spanish–American War. Both parents hitchhiked to California during the Great Depression and came to the El Cajon Valley, but moved to Fontana for a brief period during the Second World War and after.

Returning to San Diego County in 1953, Davis was raised in a tract home in the community of Bostonia. His father Dwight worked in the wholesale meat industry for the Superior Meat Company in downtown San Diego and was a member of the meat cutter's union, and his uncle ran a wholesale meat company. The nearly all-white neighborhood of Davis's childhood was populated by refugees of the Great Depression, mostly Southern Baptist families from Oklahoma and Texas, and had a country-western ballroom and rodeo. Davis identified with his community as a "redneck" and a "Westerner" in opposition to the "surfer" beach culture held by the wealthier, Methodist neighborhoods south of El Cajon's Main Street. Racism and anti-communism were endemic in the town, but Democrats held the dominant political role in the community due to the influence of the Machinists Union.

Dwight Davis was an amateur geologist, and would bring the young Davis with him on frequent excursions in the Colorado Desert to search for uranium deposits, abandoned mines, geodes, and petrified wood. The favorite stop in the desert for the two was the Ocotillo Wells gas station and café, owned by an eccentric elderly proprietor who would debate baseball with Dwight. In 1955, the young Davis was curious about several photos of cadavers taken by the proprietor and posted on the bulletin board in the café. The proprietor explained to Davis that the bodies were of young Mexican men, all executed in arroyos along the border by being shot in the back. Davis remained haunted by the photos of the corpses, and the experience would influence his ideas on the border for the rest of his life.