Steven M. Graves

Steven M. Graves was born into a large working-class family in a run-down factory town in Ohio. He moved to Los Angeles in 2003 to teach geography at CSU Northridge and escape the grey skies of his fatherland. His long-running love affair with postwar American landscapes, gas stations, diners, and other elements of car culture led him to study with landscape geographer John Jakle at the University of Illinois. Much of Graves's research has focused on the landscapes of subprime lending, but occasionally he has written about pop music, television, and crime. At home in the vast stretches of 1950s suburbia where he can live largely free from the annoyances of pretension, Graves thinks he'll do as Bing Crosby suggested in 1943, "settle down and never more roam-and make the San Fernando Valley my home."