Left Review. Davis taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and at Stony Brook University before he secured a position at University of California, Irvine's history department. He also contributed to the British monthly Socialist Review, the organ of the British Socialist Workers Party. As a journalist and essayist, Davis wrote for a number of well-known publications, including The Nation, The New Left Review, Jacobin, and the UK's New Statesman. Davis was a self-defined international socialist and "Marxist-Environmentalist". He wrote in the tradition of socialists/architects/regionalism advocates such as Lewis Mumford and Garrett Eckbo, whom he cited 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. Davis was also the author of two fiction books for young adults: Land of the Lost Mammoths and Pirates, Bats and Dragons. Criticism and academic reception 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. According to Todd Purdum's sharply critical 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". Jon Wiener has defended Davis in The Nation, maintaining that his critics are political opponents exaggerating the significance of small errors. Some academic leftists have also criticized Davis's focus on modern urban structures. In a review essay on City of Quartz, geographer Cindi Katz criticized its apocalypticism as masculinist and tied it to the flattening of people's subjectivity as they are made into "characters" more than social actors. Citing Jane Jacobs' attacks upon Lewis Mumford in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, Andy Merrifield (MetroMarxism, Routledge 2002) wrote that Davis' analysis was "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 failed to focus on