Charles Wright Mills grew up in Dallas in a thoroughly bourgeois family. His father was an insurance agency manager—one of the petty office workers that Mills would later identify as the new proletariat in his book White Collar (1951). After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin and flirting with a career as a car salesman, Mills went, in 1939, to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. There he met his mentor and later collaborator, Hans Gerth, who introduced Mills to the work of classic European sociologists, in particular Max Weber. In addition to Weber, Gerth, as a German émigré and former member of the Frankfurt School, exposed Mills to the latest European neo-Marxist sociological thought. After his first teaching job at the University of Maryland, Mills moved to Columbia University in 1946, where he stayed until his death.

His most important...