High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! White Collar: The American Middle Classes is a study of the American middle class by sociologist C. Wright Mills, first published in 1951. It describes the forming of a "new class": the white-collar workers. It is also a major study of social alienation in the modern industrialized world and cities dominated by "salesmanship mentality". The issues in this book were close to Mills` own background, his father was an insurance agent and he himself, at that time, worked as a white collar research worker in a bureaucratic organization, at Paul Lazarsfeld`s Bureau for Social Research at Columbia University. From this point of view, it is probably Mills most private book. The familiarity with the studied object as a lived matter refers with no doubt to Mills himself and his own experiences.