C. Wright Mills

Graduated from Dallas Technical High School in 1934.

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.

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.".

First child, a daughter, Pamela, born 15th January, 1943, to 1st & 2nd wife Dorothy Helen "Freya" Smith. (Mills and Smith married and divorced twice).

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.

He taught at Wisconsin and Maryland universities, and was a professor at Columbia from 1946 until his death in 1962.

His most famous books included "The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders" (1948), "White Collar: The American Middle Classes" (1951), and "The Sociological Imagination" (1959); and his best-known and most controversial work was "The Power Elite" (1956). His writings inspired a large audience, and he had an important influence on the American New Left, although he was criticized by his academic colleagues. Mills married three times, and had one child with each wife.

C. Wright Mills was a radical, controversial intellectual and social scientist in America in the 1950s.

Second child, a daughter, Kathryn, born 14th July, 1955 to 2nd wife Ruth Harper.

He and his family moved to Copenhagen where from 1956-57, Mills acted as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Copenhagen.

Is best remembered for his 1959 book "The Sociological Imagination" in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship.

August 1960, Mills spent time in Cuba as he worked on developing his text Listen, Yankee. Whilst there, he spent quite some time interviewing Fidel Castro, who admitted to having read and studied Mills' The Power Elite. Castro later came into power in January, 1959.