Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination.

[16] Mills attended Dallas Technical High School, with an interest in engineering, and his parents were preparing him for a practical career in a rapidly industrializing world of Texas.

[20] While studying at Texas, Mills met his first wife, Dorothy Helen Smith,[21] a fellow student seeking a master's degree in sociology.

[25][verification needed] Mills left Wisconsin in early 1942, after he had been appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Before Mills furthered his career, he avoided the draft by failing his physical due to high blood pressure and received a deferment.

[26] During this time, his work as an Associate Professor of Sociology from 1941 until 1945 at the University of Maryland, College Park, Mills's awareness and involvement in American politics grew.

[33][page needed] Mills married his third wife, Yaroslava Surmach, an American artist of Ukrainian descent, and settled in Rockland County, New York, in 1959.

of the Wisconsin department, and called the senior theorist there, Howard P. Becker, a "real fool.” [38] During a visit to the Soviet Union, Mills was honored as a major critic of American society.

Horowitz suggests that Mills worked at a fast pace because he felt that he would not live long, describing him as "a man in search of his destiny".

They had their disagreements, yet they grew a partnership and became fruitful collaborators who worked together for a long time to create influential viewpoints for the field of sociology.

[45] C. Wright Mills was strongly influenced by pragmatism, specifically the works of George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James.

However, Mills clearly gives precedence to social structure described by the political, economic and military institutions, and not culture, which is presented in its massified form as a means to the ends sought by the power elite.

Therefore placing him firmly in the Marxist and not Weberian camp, so much so that in his collection of classical essays, Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" is not included.

While Mills never embraced the "Marxist" label, he told his closest associates that he felt much closer to what he saw as the best currents of a flexible humanist Marxism than to alternatives.

He considered himself a "plain Marxist", working in the spirit of young Marx as he claims in his collected essays: "Power, Politics and People" (Oxford University Press, 1963).

[51] Mills argues that micro and macro levels of analysis can be linked together by the sociological imagination, which enables its possessor to understand the large historical sense in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals.

Mills shares with Marxist sociology and other "conflict theorists" the view that American society is sharply divided and systematically shaped by the relationship between the powerful and powerless.

Mills combined such conventional Marxian concerns with careful attention to the dynamics of personal meaning and small-group motivations, topics for which Weberian scholars are more noted.

"[52][page needed] Above all, Mills understood sociology, when properly approached, as an inherently political endeavor and a servant of the democratic process.

Mills shared Dewey's goal of a "creative democracy" and emphasis on the importance of political practice but criticized Dewey for his inattention to the rigidity of power structure in the U.S. Mills's dissertation was titled Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America, and West categorized him along with pragmatists in his time Sidney Hook and Reinhold Niebuhr as thinkers during pragmatism's "mid-century crisis."

Rose Kohn Goldsen was a sociology professor at Cornell University who studied the social effects of television and popular culture.

Frank W. Elwell describes this work as "an elaboration and update on Weber's bureaucratization process, detailing the effects of the increasing division of labor on the tone and character of American social life.

[60][page needed] The centralization of authority is made up of the following components: a "military metaphysic", in other words a military definition of reality; "class identity", recognizing themselves as separate from and superior to the rest of society; "interchangeability" (they move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking positions of power therein); cooperation/socialization, in other words, socialization of prospective new members is done based on how well they "clone" themselves socially after already established elites.

Mills's view on the power elite is that they represent their own interest, which include maintaining a "permanent war economy" to control the ebbs and flow of American Capitalism and the masking of "a manipulative social and political order through the mass media.

[63][page needed] In his paper on Mills's work, Elwell describes The Causes of World War Three as a jeremiad on Weber's ideas, particularly that of "crackpot realism": "the disjunction between institutional rationality and human reason".

One can interpret Mills's claim in The Sociological Imagination as the difficulty humans have in balancing biography and history, personal challenges and societal issues.

The version of Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking (1960) worked on by C. Wright Mills is simply an edited copy with the addition of an introduction written himself.

[59][page needed] The Marxists (1962) takes Mills's explanation of sociological models from Images of Man and uses it to criticize modern liberalism and Marxism.

[59][page needed] According to Stephen Scanlan and Liz Grauerholz, writing in 2009, Mills's thinking on the intersection of biography and history continued to influence scholars and their work, and also impacted the way they interacted with and taught their students.

Mills tackled relevant topics such as the growth of white collar jobs, the role of bureaucratic power, as well as the Cold War and the spread of communism.