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' public persona for the first time. Mills' 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to an imaginary friend in Russia, personal narratives by his daughters, and annotations drawing on published and unpublished material, including the FBI file on Mills.

"The extraordinary C. Wright Mills was an intellectual hero of the New Left, a model of the engaged academic. This volume of his letters and writings provides a fascinating insight into Mills as a person - as a family man and a friend - as well as a thinker. Mills packed so much into his terribly short life, and young people today should find inspiration in his enormous energy, his breadth of interest, and his political boldness." - Howard Zinn, Boston University "The 'Tovarich' essays are among the highlights of the long overdue C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings...a book of many revelations and felicities that sees the light of day 38 years after Mills' death. This volume...is indispensable to a picture of intellectuals and politics in our time, tracing out the contours of a robust life of the mind, an odyssey that seems as quaint today as anything in Homer." - Todd Gitlin, Los Angeles Times Book Review "This collection...reminds us of the writer's scrupulous and generous mind, presenting ideas that continue to resonate today...[it] offers a glimpse into the writer's personal life as well as into his intellectual relationships. One of the great discoveries included in the book is Mills's FBI file, which was started after he wrote the best-selling 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." - Publishers Weekly

C. Wright Mills was a maverick social scientist who taught in Copenhagen, London, and Mexico City in addition to the United States. His work has been translated into twenty-three languages. Kathryn Mills works for a book publisher in Boston. Pamela Mills teaches American literature and composition in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Dan Wakefield is the author of New York in the Fifties (1992), which is the basis for a documentary film, Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem (1959), and many other works, including the best-selling novels Going All the Way (1970) and Selling Out (1985).