ABSTRACT
There seems to be something of a revival of interest at the turn of the century in the work of C. Wright Mills, who died nearly forty years ago at the early age of forty-five. His two daughters have now published with a major university press a large collection of their father’s correspondence and unpublished autobiographical writings, including their own remembrances of him. The book was launched last fall at the auditorium of the New York Public Library with a panel of readings and speeches followed by a reception. Earlier in the year The Sociological Imagination was reprinted with an afterword by Todd Gitlin. The book by Guy Oakes and Arthur Vidich was published in 1999 and reviewed last July in the 7imes Literary Supplement by the well-known sociological theorist Zygmunt Bauman under the title “The Man from Waco.” Bauman’s review displayed the hagiography common to most latter-day writing on Mills while minimizing that the Oakes-Vidich book was a scarcely veiled attack to the effect that much of the early work responsible for Mills’s budding reputation was actually that of his teacher and collaborator the late Hans Gerth. Vidich, like Mills, was a student of Gerth’s at the University of Wisconsin in the 1940’s and had along with his own former collaborator and fellow-Gerth student the late Joseph Bensman been maintaining this for years. In a review in New Left Review, Russell Jacoby, a student of Gerth’s in the 1960s, observed that “the tendentious facts and sham indignation of the book are coupled with silence about its own genesis,” concluding that in contrast to what it purports to be it “is less a study of professional norms in mid-century 164America than a grudge masquerading as erudition.” I wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement citing Jacoby’s review and calling attention to Bauman’s numerous errors of fact and interpretation, but delay caused by e-mail malfunction resulted in the journal’s printing instead a shorter letter by someone else pointing out many of the same errors.
