C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills
Born	Charles Wright Mills (1916-08-28)August 28, 1916 Waco, Texas
Died	March 20, 1962(1962-03-20) (aged 45) West Nyack, New York
Alma mater	University of Texas at Austin (BA, MA); University of Wisconsin–Madison (PhD)
Occupation	Political sociologist
Known for	The Sociological Imagination

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 was published widely in popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, among them The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the U.S. political, military, and economic elites; White Collar, on the American middle class; and The Sociological Imagination, where Mills proposes the proper relationship in sociological scholarship between biography and history.

Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public and political engagement over uninterested observation. Mills' biographer, Daniel Geary, writes that his writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s." In fact, Mills popularized the term "New Left" in the U.S. in a 1960 open letter, Letter to the New Left.

Biography

Early Life: Childhood and Education (1916-1934)

Charles Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas on August 28, 1916 and lived in Texas until he was twenty-three years old. His father, Charles Grover Mills, worked as an insurance salesman while his mother, Frances Wright Mills, stayed at home as a housewife. His father moved to Texas from his home state of Florida, whereas his mother and maternal grandparents were all born and raised in Texas. His family moved constantly when he was growing up and as a result, he lived a relatively isolated life with few continuous relationships. Mills spent time living in the following cities (in order): Waco, Witchita, Fort Worth, Sherman, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. Mills graduated from Dallas Technical High School in 1934.

College Years: Undergraduate and Graduate school (1935-1942)

Mills initially attended Texas A&M University but left after his first year and subsequently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939 with a bachelor's degree in sociology and a master's degree in philosophy. By the time he graduated, Mills had already been published in the two leading sociology journals in the U.S., the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology.

While studying at Texas, Mills met his first wife, Dorothy Helen Smith, who was also a student there seeking a master’s degree in sociology. She had previously attended Oklahoma College for Women, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in commerce. They were married in October 1937. After their marriage Dorothy Helen, or "Freya," worked as a staff member of the director of the Women’s Residence Hall at the University of Texas in order to support the couple while Mills completed his graduate work; she typed and copy edited much of his work, including his Ph.D. dissertation. There he met Hans Gerth, a professor in the Department of Sociology, who became a mentor and friend, although Mills did not take any classes with Gerth. In August 1940, Freya divorced Mills, but the couple remarried in March 1941. Their daughter, Pamela, was born on January 15, 1943.

Mills received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1942. His dissertation was entitled "A Sociological Account of Pragmatism: An Essay on the Sociology of Knowledge." Mills refused to revise his dissertation while it was reviewed, and it was later accepted without approval from the review committee. Mills left Wisconsin in early 1942 upon being appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Early Career (1942-1956)

During his work as an Associate Professor of Sociology from 1941 until 1945 at the University of Maryland, College Park, Mills’ awareness and involvement in American politics grew. Mills became friends with historians, Richard Hofstader, Frank Freidel, and Ken Stampp during this period of World War II. These four academics collaborated on many topics and as a result, each wrote about many contemporary issues surrounding the war and how it affected American society.

In the mid-1940s while still at Maryland, Mills began contributing 'journalistic sociology' and opinion pieces to intellectual journals such as The New Republic, The New Leader, and Politics, the journal established by his friend Dwight Macdonald in 1944.

In 1945, Mills moved to New York after securing a research associate position at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research. Mills separated from Freya with the move, and the couple divorced in 1947. Mills was appointed Assistant Professor in the University's sociology department in 1946. Mills received a grant of $2,500 from the Guggenheim Foundation in April, 1945 to fund his research in 1946. During that time, he wrote White Collar which was finally published in 1951.

1946 saw the publication of From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, a translation of Weber's essays co-authored with Hans Gerth. In 1953, the two published a second work, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions.

In 1947, Mills married his second wife, Ruth Harper, a Bureau of Applied Social Research statistician who worked with Mills on New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951), and The Power Elite (1956). In 1949, Mills and Harper went to Chicago so that Mills could serve as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago; Mills returned to teaching at Columbia after a semester at the University of Chicago and was promoted to Associate Professor of Sociology on July 1, 1950. Their daughter, Kathryn, was born on July 14, 1955. Mills was promoted to Professor of Sociology at Columbia on July 1, 1956. From 1956-57, the family moved to Copenhagen, where Mills acted as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. Mills and Harper separated in December 1957 when Mills returned from Copenhagen alone, and divorced in 1959.

Later Years and Death (1958-1962)

Mills married his third wife, Yaroslava Surmach, an American artist of Ukrainian descent, and settled in Rockland County, New York in 1959. Their son, Nikolas Charles, was born on June 19, 1960.

In August of 1960, Mills spent time in Cuba where he worked on developing his text Listen, Yankee. He spent some of his time in Cuba interviewing Fidel Castro, who admitted to having read and studied Mills’ The Power Elite. Castro later came into power in January, 1959.

Mills was described as a man in a hurry, and aside from his hurried nature, he was largely known for his combativeness. Both his private life, with three marriages, a child from each, and several affairs, and his professional life, which involved challenging and criticizing many of his professors and coworkers, are characterized as "tumultuous". He wrote a fairly obvious, though slightly veiled, essay in criticism of the former chairman of the Wisconsin department, and called the senior theorist there, Howard Becker, a "real fool". On one special occasion when Mills was honored during a visit to the Soviet Union as a major critic of American society, he criticized censorship in the Soviet Union through his toast to an early Soviet leader who was "purged and murdered by the Stalinists," saying, "To the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published in the Soviet Union!"

In one of Mills’ biography written by Irving Louis Horowitz, the author writes about Mills’ acute awareness of his heart condition and speculates that it affected the way he lived his adult life. Mills was described as someone that worked fast, yet efficiently. This is argued to be a result of his knowing that he would not live long due to his heart health. Horowitz describes Mills as “a man in search of his destiny”.

Mills suffered from a series of heart attacks throughout his life and his fourth and final attack lead to his death on March 20, 1962.

Influences

C. Wright Mills was heavily influenced by pragmatism, specifically the works of George Mead, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James. The social structure aspects of Mills' works is largely shaped by Max Weber and the writing of Karl Mannheim, who followed Weber's work closely. Mills also acknowledged a general influence of Marxism; he noted that Marxism had become an essential tool for sociologists and therefore all must naturally be educated on the subject; any Marxist influence was then a result of sufficient education. Neo-Freudianism also helped shape Mills' work. Mills was an intense student of philosophy before he became a sociologist and his vision of radical, egalitarian democracy was a direct result of the influence of ideas from Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. During Mills’ time at the University of Wisconsin, he was heavily influenced by Hans Gerth, a Sociology Professor from Germany. Mills gained an insight into European learning and sociological theory from Gerth.

Books

From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946) was edited and translated in collaboration with Hans Gerth. Mills and Gerth began collaborating in 1940, they selected a few of Weber’s original German text and translated them into English. The preface of the book begins by explaining the disputable difference of meaning that English words give to German writing. The authors attempt to explain their devotion to being as accurate as possible in translating Weber’s writing.

The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (1948) studies the "Labor Metaphysic" and the dynamic of labor leaders cooperating with business officials. The book concludes that labour had effectively renounced its traditional oppositional role and become reconciled to life within a capitalist system. Appeased by "bread and butter" economic policies, unions had adopted, Mills argued, a pliantly subordinate role in the new structure of American power.

The Puerto Rican Journey (1950) was written in collaboration with Clarence Senior and Rose Kohn Goldsen. It documents a methodological study and does not address theoretical sociological framework.

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) offers a rich historical account of the middle class(es) in the United States and contends that bureaucracies have overwhelmed middle-class workers, robbing them of all independent thought and turning them into near-automatons, oppressed but cheerful. Mills states there are three types of power within the workplace: coercion or physical force; authority; and manipulation. Through this piece, the thoughts of Mills and Weber seem to coincide in their belief that Western Society is trapped within the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality, which would lead society to focus more on rationality and less on reason. Mills' fear was that the middle-class was becoming "politically emasculated and culturally stultified" which would allow a shift in power from the middle-class to the strong social elite. Middle-class workers receive an adequate salary but have become alienated from the world because of their inability to affect or change it.

Character and Social Structure (1953) was co-authored with Hans Gerth. This was considered his most theoretically sophisticated work. Mills later came into conflict with Gerth, though Gerth positively referred to him as, "an excellent operator, a whippersnapper, promising young man on the make, and Texas cowboy á la ride and shoot." Generally speaking, Character and Social Structure combines the social behaviorism and personality structure of pragmatism with the social structure of Weberian sociology. It is centralized around roles; how they are interpersonal and how they are related to institutions.

The Power Elite (1956) describes the relationships among the political, military, and economic elites, noting that they share a common world view; that power rests in the centralization of authority within the elites of society. This centralization of authority is made up of the following components: a "military metaphysic," in other words a military definition of reality; "class identity," recognizing themselves as separate from and superior to the rest of society; "interchangeability," i.e., they move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking positions of power therein; cooperation/socialization, in other words, socialization of prospective new members is done based on how well they "clone" themselves socially after already established elites. Mills' view on the power elite is that they represent their own interest, which include maintaining a "permanent war economy" to control the ebbs and flow of American Capitalism and the masking of "a manipulative social and political order through the mass media."

The Causes of World War Three (1958) and Listen, Yankee (1960) are considered Mills' weakest work. In both, he attempts to create a moral voice for society and make the power elite responsible to the "public". Although Listen, Yankee was considered highly controversial, it was an exploration of the Cuban revolution written from the viewpoint of a Cuban revolutionary; which was a very innovative style of writing for that period in American history.

The Sociological Imagination (1959), which is considered Mills' most influential book, describes a mindset for studying sociology — the sociological imagination — that stresses being able to connect individual experiences and societal relationships. The three components that form the sociological imagination are:

1. History: why society is what it is and how it has been changing for a long time and how history is being made in it
2. Biography: the nature of "human nature" in a society; what kinds of people inhabit a particular society
3. Social Structure: how the various institutional orders in a society function, which ones are dominant, how they are kept together, how they might be changing too, etc.

Mills asserts that a critical task for social scientists is to "translate private troubles into public issues," which is something that it is very difficult for ordinary citizens to do. The distinction between troubles and issues is that troubles relate to a single person while issues refers to a group of people. For instance, man who cannot find employment is experiencing a trouble while a city with a massive unemployment rate is experiencing an issue. Sociologists, then, rightly connect their autobiographical, personal challenges to social institutions. Social scientists should then connect those institutions to social structure(s) and locate them within a historical narrative.

The version of Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking (1960) worked on by C. Wright Mills is simply an edited copy with the addition of an introduction written himself. Through this work, Mills explains that he believes the use of models is the characteristic of classical sociologists, and that these models are the reason classical sociologists maintain relevance.

The Marxists (1962) takes Mills' explanation of sociological models from Images of Man and uses it to criticize liberalism and Marxism. He believes that the liberalist model does not work and cannot create an overarching view of society, but rather that it is more of an ideology for the entrepreneurial middle class. Marxism, however, may be incorrect in its overall view, but does have a working model for societal structure, the mechanics of the history of society, and the roles of individuals. One of Mills' problems with the Marxist model is that it uses units that are small and autonomous, which he finds too simple to explain capitalism. Mills then provides discussion on Marx as a determinist.

Legacy

Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes dedicated his novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) to Mills, "true voice of North America, friend and companion in the struggle of Latin America." Fuentes was a fan of Mills’ writing on the Cuban Revolution called, Listen, Yankee. He appreciated Mills’ insight into what he believed Cubans were experiencing as citizens of a country undergoing revolutionary change. Mills’ legacy can be most deeply felt through the printed compilation of Mills’ letters and other works called C Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, which was edited by two of his children, Kathryn and Pamela Mills. In the introduction written by Dan Wakefield, he states that Mills’ sociological vision of American society is one that transcends the field of sociology. Mills presented his ideas as a way to keep American society from falling into the trap of what is known as “mass society”. Many scholars argue that Mills’ ideas sparked the radical movements of the 1960s, which took place after he died. Not only was Mills’ work recognized in the United States, but it was also greatly appreciated abroad. His texts have been translated into twenty-three languages. Above all things, Wakefield remembers Mills’ character most as being surrounded by controversy:

In that era of cautious professors in gray flannel suits, Mills came roaring into Morningside Heights on his BMW motorcycle, wearing plaid shirts, old jeans, and work boots, carrying his books in a duffel bag strapped across his broad chest… In the classroom as well as in the pages of his widely read books, Mills was a great teacher. His lectures matched the flamboyance of his personal image, as he managed to make entertaining the heavyweight social theories of Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, and Jose Ortega y Gasset. He shocked us [students] out of our “silent generation” student torpor by pounding his desk and proclaiming that each man should build his own house (as he did himself) and that, by God, with the proper study, we should each be able to build out own car!

Outlook

There has long been debate over Mills' intellectual outlook. Mills is often seen as a "closet Marxist" because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress and attempt to keep Marxist traditions alive in social theory. Just as often however, others argue that Mills more closely identified with the work of Max Weber, whom many sociologists interpret as an exemplar of sophisticated (and intellectually adequate) anti-Marxism and modern liberalism. However, Mills clearly gives precedence to social structure described by the political, economic and military institutions and not culture, which is presented in its massified form as means to ends sought by the power elite, which puts him firmly in the Marxist and not Weberian camp, so much that in his collection of classical essays, Weber's Protestant Ethic is not included. Weber's idea of bureaucracy as internalized social control was embraced by Mills as was the historicity of his method, yet far from liberalism (being its critic), Mills was a radical who was culturally forced to distance himself from Marx while being "near" him.

While Mills never embraced the "Marxist" label, he told his closest associates that he felt much closer to what he saw as the best currents of flexible, humanist Marxism than to its alternatives. He considered himself as a "plain Marxist" working in the spirit of young Marx as he claims in his collected essays: "Power, Politics and People" (Oxford University Press, 1963). In a November 1956 letter to his friends Bette and Harvey Swados, Mills declared "[i]n the meantime, let's not forget that there's more [that's] still useful in even the Sweezy kind of Marxism than in all the routineers of J. S. Mill put together."

There is an important quotation from Letters to Tovarich (autobiographical essay) dated Fall 1957 titled "On Who I Might Be and How I Got That Way":

You've asked me, 'What might you be?' Now I answer you: 'I am a Wobbly.' I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation than to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat. […] I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a Wobbly is? It's a kind of spiritual condition. Don't be afraid of the word, Tovarich. A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He's also a man who's often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn't made up himself. He doesn't like bosses –capitalistic or communistic – they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom.

These two quotations are the ones chosen by Kathryn Mills for the better acknowledgement of the nuanced thinking of C.W.Mills.

It appears that Mills understood his position as being much closer to Marx than to Weber, albeit influenced by both, as Stanley Aronowitz argued in A Mills Revival?. Mills argues that micro and macro levels of analysis can be linked together by the sociological imagination, which enables its possessor to understand the large historical sense in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. Individuals can only understand their own experiences fully if they locate themselves within their period of history. The key factor is the combination of private problems with public issues: the combination of troubles that occur within the individual’s immediate milieu and relations with other people with matters that have to do with institutions of an historical society as a whole. Mills shares with Marxist sociology and other "conflict theorists" the view that American society is sharply divided and systematically shaped by the relationship between the powerful and powerless. He also shares their concerns for alienation, the effects of social structure on the personality, and the manipulation of people by elites and the mass media. Mills combined such conventional Marxian concerns with careful attention to the dynamics of personal meaning and small-group motivations, topics for which Weberian scholars are more noted.

Mills had a very combative outlook regarding and towards many parts of his life, the people in it, and his works. In this way, he was a self-proclaimed outsider.

I am an outlander, not only regionally, but deep down and for good.

C. Wright Mills gave considerable study to the Soviet Union. Invited to the U.S.S.R., where he was acknowledged for his criticism of American society, Mills used the opportunity to attack Soviet censorship. He did hold the controversial notion that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were ruled by similar bureaucratic power elites and thus were convergent rather than divergent societies.

Above all, Mills understood sociology, when properly approached, as an inherently political endeavor and a servant of the democratic process. In The Sociological Imagination, Mills wrote:

It is the political task of the social scientist -- as of any liberal educator – continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work – and, as an educator, in his life as well -- this kind of sociological imagination. And it is his purpose to cultivate such habits of mind among the men and women who are publicly exposed to him. To secure these ends is to secure reason and individuality, and to make these the predominant values of a democratic society.

Contemporary American scholar Cornel West argued in his text American Evasion of Philosophy that C. Wright Mills follows the tradition of pragmatism. Mills shared Dewey's goal of a "creative democracy" and emphasis on the importance of political practice but criticized Dewey for his inattention to the rigidity of power structure in the U.S. Mills' dissertation was titled Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America, and West categorized him along with pragmatists in his time Sidney Hook and Reinhold Niebuhr as thinkers during pragmatism's "mid-century crisis".

The C. Wright Mills Award

The Society for the Study of Social Problems established the C. Wright Mills Award in 1964 for the book that "best exemplifies outstanding social science research and a great understanding the individual and society in the tradition of the distinguished sociologist, C. Wright Mills." The criteria are for the book that most effectively:

1. critically address an issue of contemporary public importance,
2. bring to the topic a fresh, imaginative perspective,
3. advance social scientific understanding of the topic,
4. display a theoretically informed view and empirical orientation,
5. evince quality in style of writing,
6. explicitly or implicitly contains implications for courses of action.

Recipients of the C. Wright Mills Award

Year	Name	Book Title
2013	Nancy DiTomaso	The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism
2012	Cybelle Fox	Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal
2011	Shamus Rahman Khan	Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School
2010	Mark Hunter	Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa
2009	Mario Luis Small	Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life
2008	Martín Sánchez-Jankowski	Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods
2007	Daniel Jaffee	Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
2006	Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh	Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
2005	Pun Ngai	Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
2004	Mario Luis Small	Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio
2003	Sharon Hays	Flat Broke With Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform
2002	Co-Winner, Gordon Lafer	The Job Training Charade
2002	Co-Winner, David Naguib Pellow	Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago
2001	Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo	Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence
2000	Michèle Lamont	The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration
1999	Mitchell Duneier	Sidewalk
1998	Monica J. Casper	The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery
1997	John Hagan and Bill McCarthy	Mean Streets: Youth Crime and Homelessness
1996	Steven Epstein	Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge
1995	Co-Winner, Philippe Bourgois	In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
1995	Co-Winner, Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro	Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality
1994	Robert Thomas	What Machines Can’t Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise
1993	David Wagner	Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community
1992	Roger N. Lancaster	Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua
1991	Sharon Zukin	Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World
1990	Patricia Hill Collins	Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
1989	Co-Winner, Douglas McAdam	Freedom Summer
1989	Co-Winner, Alan Wolfe	Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation
1988	Co-Winner, Ivan Szelenyi	Socialist Entrepreneurs: Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary
1988	Co-Winner, John Sutton	Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United States, 1640-1981
1987	William J. Wilson	The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy
1986	Co-Winner, Diana E. H. Russell	The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women
1986	Co-Winner, Charles Tilly	The Contentious French: Four Centuries of Popular Struggle
1986	Co-Winner, Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen Whitt	The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation
1985	Viviana A. Zelizer	Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children
1984	Co-Winner, Michael Useem	The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the U.S. and U.K.
1984	Co-Winner, Richard Madsen	Morality and Power in a Chinese Village
1983	Manuel Castells	The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements
1982	Paul Starr	The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry
1981	Judith Lewis Herman	Father-Daughter Incest
1980	Michael Lipsky	Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services
1979	Theda Skocpol	States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
1978	Walter Korpi	The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism: Work, Unions and Politics in Sweden
1977	Rosabeth Moss Kanter	Men and Women of the Corporation
1976	Janice E. Perlman	The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro
1975	Mary O. Furner	Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science
1974	Harry Braverman	Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
1973	Co-Winner, James B. Rule	Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age
1973	Co-Winner, Isaac D. Balbus	The Dialectics of Legal Repression: Black Rebels before the American Courts
1972	David M. Gordon	Theories of Poverty and Underemployment: Orthodox, Radical and Dual Labor Market Perspectives
1971	Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward	Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare
1970	Jacqueline P. Wiseman	Stations of the Lost: The Treatment of Skid Row Alcoholics
1969	Laud Humphreys	Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places
1968	Gerald D. Suttles	The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City
1967	Co-Winner, Elliott Liebow	Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Street Corner Men
1967	Co-Winner, Travis Hirschi and Hanan C. Selvin	Delinquency Research: An Appraisal of Analytical Methods
1966	Jerome H. Skolnick	Justice Without Trial
1965	Robert Boguslaw	The New Utopians
1964	David Matza	Delinquency and Drift

See also

• Military-industrial complex

Further reading

• Herbert Aptheker, The World of C. Wright Mills. New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1960.
• Stanley Aronowitz, "A Mills Revival?" Logos Journal, Summer 2003.
• Stanley Aronowitz. Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
• G. William Domhoff, "Mills's The Power Elite 50 Years Later," Contemporary Sociology, November 2006.
• Douglas F. Dowd, "On Veblen, Mills... And the Decline of Criticism," Dissent, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1964), pp. 29–38.
• John Eldridge, C. Wright Mills (Key Sociologists). Ellis Horwood, 1983.
• Daniel Geary, "Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought." Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 2009.
• Geary, Daniel (2008). "'Becoming International Again': C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left". Journal of American History. 95 (3): 710–736. doi:10.2307/27694377.
• Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills, an American Utopian (1983).
• Tom Hayden with Contemporary Reflections by Stanley Aronowitz, Richard Flacks, and Charles Lemert, Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times. East Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.
• Keith Kerr. Postmodern Cowboy: C. Wright Mills and a New 21st Century Sociology. East Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008.
• Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
• A.J. Muste and Irving Howe, "C. Wright Mills' Program: Two Views," Dissent, vol. 6, no. 2 (Spring 1959), pp. 189–196.
• Harvey Swados, "C. Wright Mills: A Personal Memoir," Dissent, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter 1963), pp. 35–42.
• E.P. Thompson, "C. Wright Mills: The Responsible Craftsman," Radical America, vol. 13, no. 4 (July-Aug. 1979), pp. 60–73.
• Rick Tilman, C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and his American Roots. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984.
• A. Javier Trevino, The Social Thought of C. Wright Mills. Sage Publications, 2012.

Primary sources

• Kathryn Mills (ed.) with Pamela Mills, C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings. Introduction by Dan Wakefield. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.

External links

• Official website
• The Power Elite-Full Book online
• Frank Elwell's page at Rogers State
• An interview with Mills's daughters, Kathryn and Pamela
• C. Wright Mills and Radical Sociology-Joseph A. Scimecca
• Mills-On Intellectual Craftsmanship
• Contemporary C.Wright Mills
• C.W Mills, Structure of Power in American Society,British Journal of Sociology,Vol.9.No.1 1958
• A Mills Revival?
• C.Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three
• C.Wright Mills, Letter to the New Left
• Sociology-Congress in Köln 2000 workshop: C. Wright Mills and his Power Elite: Actuality today?
• John D Brewer, C.Wright Mills, the LSE and the sociological imagination [2]
• Daniel Geary (2009). Radical Ambition. C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought. University of California Press. Chapter 6 [3]
• Daniel Geary in C.S.Soong's radio program Against the Grain (KPFA 94,1 MHz) on C.Wright Mills [4]