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 world of advanced capitalism, where cities are 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.