Although it’s rare in the contemporary world of letters, Davis comes from the working class. Born in 1946 in Southern California, he grew up in a blue-collar town just outside of Los Angeles. His father was a meatcutter who suffered a heart attack after the family moved to an area near San Diego. After his father’s death, Davis dropped out of high school to work at a meat company to support the family. It was during this time that his radicalization began in earnest, though as he notes, his father had set him on this path several years earlier. In Davis’s introduction to/The//Bending Cross/, the 2007 rerelease of Ray Ginger’s biography of Eugene Debs, he mentions that he first read the book in these years: “Thanks to the powder-blue ‘55 Chevy that I plowed into a wall while street racing with drunken teenage friends,” he was stuck in the hospital when his father gave him a copy of it.

After returning to school and graduating, Davis landed a full scholarship to Reed College, only to get kicked out for living in his girlfriend’s dorm. By that point, the upheavals of the 1960s were in full swing. Cut loose from college, he moved to Los Angeles and threw himself into activism, burning his draft card in 1963 and joining Students for a Democratic Society in 1964. By the following year, Davis had risen up through the ranks of the organization and was serving as its LA regional organizer.

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/mike-davis-old-gods-set-night/



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