and civil rights movement. The first, in February, was a rally in solidarity with Julian Bond and the peace demonstrations in the South, meant to bring closer ties between the peace and civil rights movements. In May, Davis helped organize a protest against the manufacture of napalm used in the Vietnam War by Dow Chemical, with SDS picketing the Dow Chemical plant in Torrance in coordination with other national protests originating from the Stanford Committee for Peace in Viet Nam. The Torrance picket was countered by demonstrators from the Victory in Vietnam Association, headed by local chapter leader Dana Rohrabacher. Davis also frequently spoke on behalf of SDS in public debates and conferences on world affairs and social revolutions. In 1967, Davis briefly left Los Angeles to organize for SDS in Texas, and lived in Austin. While in Texas, Davis sought out the populist news editor Archer Fullingham. At the time, Davis was still wary of Marxism and the number of his friends who were becoming Marxists, and instead was interested in the idea of reviving the Populist Party. He approached Fullingham at his residence in Kountze, and proposed the idea to the editor, suggesting that Fullingham could be the leader of the party. According to Davis, Fullingham rebuked him, calling him "...one of the dumbest piss-ants I've ever met," and suggested Davis "figure out this stuff for yourself." In late 1967 and 1968, Davis returned to Los Angeles and joined the Southern California District of the Communist Party, headed by Dorothy Healey, in solidarity with their stand against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He left SDS after the 1969 "Days of Rage," and looked back on the achievements of the movement with ambivalence. His education was punctuated by stints as a meat cutter, truck driver, and a Congress of Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist. At 28, Davis returned to college, studying economics and history at the University of California, Los Angeles on a union scholarship. Davis earned his BA and MA degrees, but did not complete the PhD program in history. Career Davis 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 was Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New