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.