cover image C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings

C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings

C. Wright Mills. University of California Press, $40 (406pp) ISBN 978-0-520-21106-3

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 This collection of Mills's selected letters and shorter unpublished or uncollected writings reminds us of the writer's scrupulous and generous mind, presenting ideas that continue to resonate today.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)