“I love Los Angeles. How can you not see that? I suppose the book is, in the end, a failure if it betrays none of the sense of deep feeling I have about the city,” Davis told Salon. “That’s where being a radical comes in — you have to rain on the parade.”
Where Didion saw dread and doom in suburban Los Angeles, writer D.J. Waldie saw the positive intersection of place and personality .March 10, 1946, in Fontana, one of three children of working-class parents from Ohio who hitchhiked to California during the Great Depression. When Davis was a young boy, his family relocated to Bostonia, a tiny hamlet in San Diego County on the outskirts of El Cajon.
There were also the shifting circumstances of his family life. When Davis was 16, his father suffered a “catastrophic heart attack,” an event that rattled the family financially. Out of necessity, he took a semester off from school to drive a delivery truck. The gig provided a needed paycheck. It also introduced him to the politics of labor and Marxism.
He attended Reed College in Oregon briefly, lasting only a couple of weeks before getting thrown out for living in his girlfriend’s dorm. That stint, however, connected him with the left-leaning Students for a Democratic Society, and he became the group’s first regional organizer in Southern California. The experience was essential to cultivating his activist streak. Later in life, however, he expressed disappointment with the student movement. “The New Left weren’t heroes,” he said. “We lost.