When Mike Davis died last month, he was a celebrity, but hardly one drawn to his effervescent fame. City of Quartz, his surprise bestseller, won him an international audience in 1990. Davis later reported himself “utterly shocked” by the book’s success. Thereafter, he might have spent decades on the lecture circuit, but Davis plowed ahead, turning out one volume of Marxist-inflected social criticism after another, often contemplating an amazingly disparate set of apocalyptic challenges: climate change, world hunger, viral pandemics, and the rise of homegrown fascism.

Davis taught at a dozen colleges and universities, hung out with scores of transatlantic intellectuals, and wrote or edited books with other academics, but he was above all an autodidact of enormous, far-ranging erudition. He dropped in and out of both high school and college, and Davis never actually took a PhD, reportedly because his UCLA faculty mentors insisted that he had not taken the required set of courses. All this merely enhanced his working-class persona, an authentic product of Southern California’s gritty industrial frontier.

Davis was born in 1946 in Fontana, the home of a giant Kaiser steel mill fifty miles outside of LA. His parents were unionists and progressives, but Davis encountered plenty of working-class racists when the family moved to El Cajon, near San Diego. That familiarity with the more retrograde elements of the white working class would forever inure Davis against any sense of class or ethnic essentialism and the academic romanticism that sometimes accompanied it. Indeed, Davis once told a reporter he had been a “right-wing, ultra-patriotic” youth, and then only if he was actually thinking about politics instead of stealing cars or drag racing.