C. Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas, on August 28, 1916. In the 1940s the governor of Texas observed that the frontiersmen who settled the wilderness that became Texas carried an ax, a rifle and a Bible (Powers 2015, 29). When Mills became an Ivy League professor and a New York intellectual, he was not averse to embellishing his Wild West provenance, solidifying his image of the intellectual who wrote by riding and shooting. Playing the part of the outlander, he kept his distance from the pretensions of the Claremont Avenue set and the cultural refinements of Morningside Heights in the neighborhood of Columbia University, where he taught in the undergraduate college. Mills seems to have believed that he forged in the smithy of his soul – if not the uncreated conscience of his race, then at least his own identity – creating himself ex nihilo. In fact, he received an excellent education at the University of Texas, especially in philosophy with George Gentry and David Miller. Both had doctorates from the University of Chicago, where they had studied with George Herbert Mead. Mills studied economics with Clarence Ayres, another Chicago doctorate in philosophy who taught institutional economics. Compared to contemporary graduate education in Anglophone sociology – where training in philosophy and economics ranges from primitive to nonexistent outside the subdisciplines of economic sociology and what is loosely called methodology – Mills's education was remarkably comprehensive and thorough. Yet he devoted much of his career to puncturing the mythologies, illusions and self-deceptions of his contemporaries.

Autobiographical fictionalizations aside, Mills was a protean and endlessly restless thinker.