SOCIAL THINKER AND THEORIST

Dissenter.

C. Wright Mills has been referred to as America's "foremost dissenter"; he rose to prominence during the 1950s as a dynamic liberal social thinker. David Halberstam observed that he provided an intellectual bridge between old Left—the Communists of the Great Depression and their sympathizers—and the New Left of the 1960s.

Early Life.

Mills spent an alienated and lonely childhood in West Texas and then Dallas. In college he studied sociology and philosophy, first at the University of Texas at Austin and then at the University of Wisconsin. Throughout his academic career he impressed his professors with his brilliance, his appetite for knowledge, and his brashness. One professor said of him, "The prevailing legend about him is to the effect that he takes people up and pursues them furiously until they get so tired of it they rebuff him (or until he has milked them...