C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills
Born	Charles Wright Mills (1916-08-28)August 28, 1916 Waco, Texas, U.S.
Died	March 20, 1962(1962-03-20) (aged 45) West Nyack, New York, U.S.
Spouses	Dorothy Helen Smith (m. 1937; div. 1940; m. 1941; div. 1947) Ruth Harper (m. 1947; div. 1959) Yaroslava Surmach ​ (m. 1959)​
Children	3
Academic background
Education	University of Texas at Austin (BA, MA) University of Wisconsin–Madison (PhD)
Thesis	A Sociological Account of Pragmatism (1942)
Doctoral advisor	Howard P. Becker[1] Edward Alsworth Ross
Influences	John Dewey William James Paul Lazarsfeld[2] Karl Mannheim Karl Marx[3] George Herbert Mead Franz Neumann Charles Sanders Peirce Thorstein Veblen Max Weber[4]
Academic work
Discipline	Sociology
Sub-discipline	Political sociology
School or tradition	New Left
Institutions	University of Maryland Columbia University
Notable students	Morris Rosenberg[5]
Notable works	White Collar (1951) The Power Elite (1956) The Sociological Imagination (1959)
Notable ideas	Elite theory sociological imagination criticism of abstract empiricism coining the term grand theory
Influenced	Stanley Cohen[6] G. William Domhoff Tom Hayden[7][8] Rosabeth Moss Kanter[9] Ralph Miliband[10] Teodor Shanin William Appleman Williams[11] Jock Young[12]

Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination.^[13] Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s era."^[13] It was Mills who popularized the term New Left in the U.S. in a 1960 open letter, "Letter to the New Left".^[14]