Charles Wright Mills (28 August 1916-20 March 1962) was an American sociologist and professor at Columbia University from 1946 to 1962. He conceived the idea of sociological imagination - the ability to see how individual experiences are connected to the larger society through their personal troubles and public issues.
Biography[]
Charles Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas in 1916, and he went to the University of Texas at Austin and began publishing for sociology journals while still a student. In 1942, he became a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, working there until 1945; from 1946 to 1962, he was a professor at Columbia University in New York City. He wrote for the progressive The New Republic, the liberal anti-communist The New Leader, and the quarterly Politics, and he later authored several of his own books. In The Power Elite, he introduced the term "power elite" when referring to class alliances among the American political, military, and economic elites, he wrote White Collar: The American Middle Classes in 1951 about the rise of white-collar workers, and wrote The Sociological Imagination about how a person's biography (personal experiences) related to history (one's background). He advocated increased public engagement for intellectuals, criticized the formation of power elites in both capitalism and communism (even attacking Soviet censorship while visiting the USSR, and advocating for Leon Trotsky's works to be published), and popularized the term "New Left" in a 1960 open letter, "Letter to the New Left". He died of a heart attack in West Nyack, Rockland County, New York in 1962 at the age of 45.