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 Lazarsfelds , 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 is obvious and the sympathy for the lonely person in the crowd, refers with no doubt to Mills himself and his own experiences.

As Mills wrote:.

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