Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1962, West Nyack, New York) was an American sociologist. Mills 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 is also known for studying the structures of power and class in the U.S. in his book The Power Elite. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public and political engagement over uninterested observation.

Mills graduated from Dallas Technical High School in 1934. He initially attended Texas A&M University but left after his first year and subsequently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1941. After a stint at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1945 he took a research associate position at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research. The following year he was made assistant professor in the university's sociology department. He remained with the department despite the controversy he sometimes created, until he died at home of a heart attack (the third he had suffered). In the mid-1940s, together with Paul Goodman, he contributed to Politics, the journal edited during the 1940s by Dwight Macdonald.