C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings [Paperback]

C. Wright Mills (Author), Kathryn Mills (Editor), Pamela Mills (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 6, 2001

One of the leading public intellectuals of twentieth-century America and a pioneering and brilliant social scientist, C. Wright Mills left a legacy of interdisciplinary and hard-hitting work including two books that changed the way many people viewed their lives and the structure of power in the United States: White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). Mills persistently challenged the status quo within his profession--as in The Sociological Imagination (1959)--and within his country, until his untimely death in 1962. This collection of letters and writings, edited by his daughters, allows readers to see behind Mills's public persona for the first time.
Mills's letters to prominent figures--including Saul Alinsky, Daniel Bell, Lewis Coser, Carlos Fuentes, Hans Gerth, Irving Howe, Dwight MacDonald, Robert K. Merton, Ralph Miliband, William Miller, David Riesman, and Harvey Swados--are joined by his letters to family members, letter-essays to an imaginary friend in Russia, personal narratives by his daughters, and annotations drawing on published and unpublished material, including the FBI file on Mills.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The U.S. intellectual and political world was jolted in 1962, when famed progressive political commentator and sociologist C. Wright Mills died of a heart attack at age 45. This collection of Mills's selected letters and shorter unpublished or uncollected writings reminds us of the writer's scrupulous and generous mind, presenting ideas that continue to resonate today. Edited by his daughters, the collection offers a glimpse into the writer's personal life as well as into his intellectual relationships with such vital 20th-century thinkers as David Riesman, Saul Alinsky, Leo Lowenthal, Harvey Swados and Dan Wakefield (who wrote the introduction to the book). Most illuminating are Mills's "letters" to "Tovarich," an imaginary friend in the Soviet Union, to whom he muses on American politics and the state of the world. He occasionally demonstrates his na?vet?, as when he writes about race relations in the U.S., but his insights are keen when he writes about university life and McCarthyism. One of the great discoveries included in the book is Mills's FBI file, which was started after he wrote the bestselling Listen, Yankee (1960), a defense of the Cuban revolution. This file, which documents a possible assassination attempt on Mills in response to the book, is a chilling reminder of the hostility faced by liberal intellectuals in the 1950s. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This book marks an important contribution to our understanding of the provocative work of eminent sociologist Mills, author of White Collar, The Power Elite, and The Sociological Imagination. Mills, who left a lasting impression on his Columbia University students (including author Dan Wakefield, who provides an introduction to this volume), challenged the status quo and anticipated the societal struggles of the 1960s (and beyond) in his energetic but all-too-brief life (he died in 1962 at the age of 45). Here Mills's daughters have selected some 150 letters Mills wrote to distinguished thinkers of his day. They create a fascinating picture of a passionate intellectual at work. Early letters to his family anticipate Mills's future directions. "So I am learning American history in order to quote it at the sons of bitches who run American Big Business," he wrote his parents in 1942. The editors' descriptions of the contexts of many letters,a chronology of Mills's life, and notes on correspondents enrich this volume. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.
-Ellen Gilbert, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (August 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520232097
• ISBN-13: 978-0520232099
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #992,992 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars C. Wright Mills: Letters and Writings, A Brief Review, June 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Hardcover)

I have been eagerly awating the publication of these glimpses into Mills' 'personal' life. The book is organized, for the most part, chronologically. Its contents are mostly letters written by this most influental radical intellectuall of the cold war period. The letters (and autobiographical writings disguised as letters) reveal Mills to be as intense, focused, and dedicated to his social analysis as I, a student of his work, have imagined him to be. The writings are beautifully composed; Mills was indeed both a scientist AND an artist. His musings are inspiring for any student, scholar, or critical minded person who wants an insight into Mills "private" reflections. This book could also serve as a wonderful guide to a study of Mills' life-work, as we are given insight into his concerns and struggles during his writing process. I do have a complaint...his daughters, who have no doubt taken painstaking efforts to compose this work, have been so bold as to alter the language of his personal writings... "we occasionally changed 'men' to 'people'" (p. xiv). I think we are wise enough to realize that Mills language is a reflection of the social and historical context in which he lived...Regardless, we are lucky to have this invaluable resource that provides endless reflections into the life and though of C. Wright Mills. END

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Publisher responds to customer review, September 20, 2000

By 

Publisher (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Hardcover)

A customer review on this site states that the editors have changed the word "men" to "people" in the letters. As the publisher, we would like to place this statement in its proper context.

The unmarked edits only occurred in the Tovarich letters, those that were written to an imaginary Russian correspondent. Mills "made it clear [to his agent] that he wanted the Tovarich writings to be edited before they were published . . . his marginal comments included these instructions: 'very good, use it,' 'can't use this,' 'cut somewhat.'" And so, unlike for the rest of the letters, the editors "did not mark deletions with ellipses and occasionally changed the location of paragraphs, shortened a heading, or relaced a heading with a phrase that Mills had written in the text. Although we usually left the original references to men, boys, women, and girls in these essays, we occasionally changed 'men' to 'people.'"

In the rest of the letters, the only editorial changes were spelling corrections and occasional deletions (the latter are always marked with brackets).

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Look At The Insights Of An Intellectual Titan!, October 22, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Hardcover)

No one has written with more verve and authority about the awesome and frightening capabilities of man than the late C. Wright Mills, a prominent and controversial sociologist who wrote such memorable tomes as "White Collar", an exploration of the emerging American Middle class in the early 1950s, and The Power Elite", a provocative examination of the nature of power, privilege, and status in the United States, and how each of these three critical elements of power and property in this country are irrevocably connected to each other. At last look, both books were still in print and are still used in both undergraduate and graduate sociology courses throughout the world. After fifty years, that in and of itself is powerful testimony to his enduring value as a scholar and an original thinker.

Here Mills focuses memorably on the qualities and uses of the sociological perspective in modern life, how such a scientifically based way of looking at, interpreting, and interacting with the larger world invests its user with a better, more accurate, and quite instrumental picture of what is happening meaningfully around him. For Mills, the key to understanding the value in such a perspective is in appreciating that one can only understand the motives, behavior, and actions of others by locating them within a wider and more meaningful context that connects their personal biographies with the large social circumstances that surround, direct, and propel them at any given historical moment. For Mills, for example, trying to understand the reasoning behind the sometimes desperate actions of Jews in Nazi Germany without appreciating the horrifyingly unique existential circumstances they found themselves in is hopelessly anachronistic and limited.

On the other hand, one invested with such an appreciation for how biography and history interact to create the meaningful social circumstances of any situation finds himself better able to understand the fact that when in a country of one hundred million employed, one man's singular lack of employment might be due to his persoanl deficiencies or lack of a work ethic, and be laid at his feet as a personal trouble, it is also true that when twenty million individuals out of that one hundred million figure suddenly find themselves so disposed and unemployed, that situation is due to something beyond the control of those many individuals and is best described in socioeconomic terms as a social problem to be laid at the feet of the government and industry to resolve. To Mills, it is critical to understand the inherant differences between personal troubles on the one hand, which an individual has the responsibity to resolve and overcome, and social ills, which are beyond both his ken or control. Indeed, according to Mills, increasingly in the 20th century one finds himself trapped by social circumstance into dilemmas he is absolutely unable to resolve without significant help from the wider social community.

Thus, for both psychological as well as social reasons, a person using the sociological perspective, or invested with what he called the "sociological imagination", is more able to think and act critically in accordance with the evidence both outside his door and beyond himself. Fifty years later, such a recognition of "what's what" and "who's who" based on the ability to judge the information within the social environment is as valuable as ever. This is a wonderful book, written in a very accessible and entertaining style, meant both for an intellectual audience and for the scholastic community as well. While it may not be for "everyman", any person wanting to better understand and more fully appreciate how individual biography and social history meaningfully interact to create the realities we live in will enjoy and appreciate this legendary sociological critique and invitation to the pleasures of a sociological perspective by one of its most remarkable proponents some half century ago.