Writing about Mike Davis is a daunting task. You feel like you’re not worthy to weigh in on the work of such a staggeringly brilliant mind — because you’re not. No one is.

Davis, who died yesterday at the age of seventy-six, would have hated reading such a line about himself. But like it or not, he wrote like no other writer, in powerful prose, synthesizing original, historically grounded arguments about the working class, the weather, colonialism, the city of Los Angeles and cities around the world, war, slums, viral plagues, and much more in an enormous stack of books, essays, and interviews. We at Jacobin were lucky to publish him numerous times over the years.

Davis’s work garnered immense praise. He won awards like the MacArthur “genius grant”; the pope and foreign presidents sought his audience; in a 1995 New York Times Magazine profile, a copy of City of Quartz showed up in Bruce Willis’s trailer. But Davis never had any interest in seeing himself as somehow apart from the lives of the rest of us simply because he knew how to write a sentence. He devoted himself instead to the life of an “old school socialist.”