- First child, a daughter, Pamela, born 15th January, 1943, to 1st & 2nd wife Dorothy Helen "Freya" Smith. (Mills and Smith married and divorced twice).
- Graduated from Dallas Technical High School in 1934.
- First wife, Dorothy Helen "Freya" Smith, had previously attended Oklahoma College for Women, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce. At the time of meeting Mills at the University of Texas in Austin, Smith was studying for her master's degree in sociology.
- August 1960, Mills spent time in Cuba as he worked on developing his text Listen, Yankee. Whilst there, he spent quite some time interviewing Fidel Castro, who admitted to having read and studied Mills' The Power Elite. Castro later came into power in January, 1959.
- In 1949, he and Ruth Harper went to Chicago so that Mills could serve as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago; He returned to teaching at Columbia after a semester at the University of Chicago and was promoted to Associate Professor of Sociology on July 1, 1950.
- Received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1942. His dissertation was entitled "A Sociological Account of Pragmatism: An Essay on the Sociology of Knowledge.".
- Advocated public, political engagement over uninterested observation.
- His maternal grandparents: Braxton Bragg Wright, a cattle rancher whose family had been in America for several generations. His wife, Elizabeth Gallagher Wright "Biggy", was the daughter of immigrants from County Leitrim, Ireland.
- Refused to revise his dissertation while it was reviewed, and it was later accepted without approval from the review committee.
- Was often described as a man in a hurry, and as Irving Louis Horowitz stated in Mills' biography, he was probably aware of the fact he may lead a short life and thus, led him to hurry about. Horowitz described Mills as "a man in search of his destiny".
- Mills commuted to Columbia College on his motorcycle.
- His father, Charles Grover "C.G." Mills, worked as an insurance salesman while his mother, Frances Ursula Wright Mills, was a stay-at-home housewife. The family moved constantly as he was growing up and as a result, he lived a relatively isolated life with few continuous relationships. He spent time living in: Waco, Wichita Falls, Fort Worth, Sherman, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio.
- Received a grant of $2,500 from the Guggenheim Foundation in April, 1945 to fund his research in 1946. During that time, he wrote "White Collar" which was finally published in 1951.
- He and his family moved to Copenhagen where from 1956-57, Mills acted as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Copenhagen.
- Was promoted to Professor of Sociology at Columbia on July 1, 1956.
- Second child, a daughter, Kathryn, born 14th July, 1955 to 2nd wife Ruth Harper.
- Initially attended Texas A&M University but left after his first year and subsequently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939 with a bachelor's degree in sociology and a master's degree in philosophy.
- Third child, a son, Nikolas Charles, born 19th June, 1960 to 3rd wife, Yaroslava Surmach.
- Is best remembered for his 1959 book "The Sociological Imagination" in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship.
- He always feared his life would be short since he was aware he suffered from heart disease and had suffered numerous heart attacks over the years. As he had feared, his fourth heart attack led to his death at the age of 45.
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