Biography

C. Wright Mills

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C. Wright Mills was a radical, controversial intellectual and social scientist in America in the 1950s. 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. Two daughters of Mills's published a book of his collected letters in 2000.
- IMDb mini biography by: Vicki McClure Davidson

First child, a daughter, Pamela, born 15th January, 1943, to 1st & 2nd wife Dorothy Helen "Freya" Smith. (Mills and Smith married and divorced twice).
Graduated from Dallas Technical High School in 1934.
First wife, Dorothy Helen "Freya" Smith, had previously attended Oklahoma College for Women, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce. At the time of meeting Mills at the University of Texas in Austin, Smith was studying for her master's degree in sociology.
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.
In 1949, he and Ruth Harper went to Chicago so that Mills could serve as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago; He 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.

The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.
Third, a good intellectual engages in continual review of thoughts and experiences.
"Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist".
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.
The history that now effects every man is world history

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