Born in Fontana, California and raised in El Cajon, California, Davis' education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist. He briefly studied at Reed College in the mid-1960s but did not begin his academic career in earnest until the early 1970s, when he earned BA and MA degrees but did not complete the Ph.D. program in History from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a 1996-1997 Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute and received a MacArthur Fellowship Award in 1998. He won the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2007.

Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New Left Review. Davis has taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture before he secured a position at University of California, Irvine's history department. He also contributes to the British monthly Socialist Review, the organ of the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain. As a journalist and essayist, Davis has written frequently for, among others, The Nation and the UK's New Statesman.

He is a self-defined international socialist and "Marxist-Environmentalist". He writes in the tradition of socialists/architects/regionalism advocates such as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo, whom he cites in Ecology of Fear. His early book, Prisoners of the American Dream, was an important contribution to the Marxist study of U.S. history, political economy, and the state, as well as to the doctrine of Revolutionary integrationism, as Davis, like other Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman, Richard S. Fraser, James Robertson, as well as French anarchist Daniel Guérin, argued that the struggle of blacks in the U.S. was for equality, that this struggle was an explosive contradiction fundamental to the U.S. bourgeois republic, that only socialism could bring it about, and that its momentum would someday be a powerful contribution to a socialist revolution in the U.S.

Davis is also the author of two fiction books for young adults: Land of The Lost Mammoths and Pirates, Bats and Dragons.

Reviewers have praised Davis' prose style and his exposés of economic, social, environmental and political injustice. His book Planet of Slums inspired a special issue of Mute Magazine on global slums. City of Quartz is notable for predicting some of the tensions that would lead into the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

The popular success of Davis' many critical studies has incited some to denounce or scrutinize aspects of his reporting. Malibu Realtor Ross Ernest Shockley (aka "Brady Westwater") argued that Davis distorts or makes up facts to overdramatize his case against the contemporary capitalist city. This argument was subsequently repeated by Los Angeles communications professional Jill Stewart, who labeled Davis a "city-hating socialist" in the New Times Los Angeles. These views were brought to a broader audience in Salon.com. According to Todd Purdum's unfriendly 1999 piece, Davis "acknowledged fabricating an entire conversation with a local environmentalist, Lewis McAdams, for a cover story he wrote for L.A. Weekly a decade ago (in the late 1980s); he defends it as an early attempt at journalistic scene-setting." However, in his October 2004 Geography article, "That Certain Feeling: Mike Davis, Truth and the City," Kevin Stannard held that this "controversy is explained by Davis's ambiguous balancing of academic research and reportage," although that same balance has also been noted for its informative readability and effectiveness (see above). Jon Wiener in the Nation has defended Davis, maintaining that these arguments against the validity of Davis' findings and interpretation are based in little more than big city boosterism.

Some academic leftists have also criticized Davis' less-than-celebratory focus on the material impacts of capitalist inequality. Citing Jane Jacobs' attacks upon Lewis Mumford in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, Andy Merrifield (MetroMarxism, Routledge 2002) has attacked Davis' analysis as "harsh" (p. 170). Davis' work, particularly Planet of Slums, has been criticized by Merrifield and urban studies professor Tom Angotti as "anti-urban" and "overly apocalyptic." These critics charge that Davis fails to focus on what they see as the potential of activist groups among the poor and working class to address the problems of the contemporary metropolis on a local or citywide basis, as advocated by Manuel Castells and Marshall Berman. Davis, however, is less interested in such a reformist approach to the existing city as an end in itself, than he is in a global working-class social movement toward a revolutionary transformation of the city, along with capitalism itself, to ecological sustainability and socialist regionalism, as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo advocated.

Books

Nonfiction

• Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control, The Ecology of Fear (1992)
• Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (1986, 1999)
• City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990, 2006)
• ¿Quién mató a Los Ángeles? (1994, Spanish only)
• Casino Zombies: True Stories From the Neon West (1999, German only)
• Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (2000)
• Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City (2000)
• Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)
• The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas, edited with Hal Rothman (2002)
• Dead Cities, And Other Tales (2003)
• Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, with Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew (2003)
• Cronache Dall’Impero (2005, Italian only)
• The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu (2005)
• Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class (2006)
• No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, with Justin Akers Chacon (2006)
• Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007)
• In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire (2007)
• Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk (2007)

Fiction

• Islands Mysterious: Where Science Rediscovers Wonder — a Trilogy, illustrated by William Simpson
• 1. Land of the Lost Mammoths (2003)
• 2. Pirates, Bats, and Dragons (2004)
• 3. Spider Vector (forthcoming)

Articles and essays

• The Democrats After November, New Left Review, 43, January—February 2007
• Vigilante Man
• A Paradise Built on Oil
• Has Time Run Out? - The Coming Avian Flu Pandemic
• The Mysteries of New Orleans - Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy
• Poor, Black, and Left Behind
• Remembering Bill and Ivan
• The Perfect Fire
• "The Flames of New York", New Left Review, 12, November—December 2001
• "Planet of Slums", New Left Review, 26, March—April 2004
• "Cry California"
• "The Winged Killer Flies In", Red Pepper, December 2005
• "Believer Interview", The Believer , February 2004
• "Who Is Killing New Orleans?", in The Nation, April 10, 2006