C. Wright Mills

American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death from a heart attack on 20 March 1962 in West Nyack, New York.

Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, among them "The Power Elite" (1956), which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the U.S. political, military, and economic elites; "White Collar" (1951), on the American middle class; and "The Sociological Imagination" (1959), where Mills proposes the proper relationship in sociological scholarship between biography and history.

Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public and political engagement over uninterested observation.

It was Mills who popularized the term "New Left" in the U.S. in a 1960 open letter, "Letter to the New Left."