From the preface of first edition The C Programming Language. Just interesting to note the authors never claimed it was low level, just not "very high level."

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C is a general-purpose programming language with features economy of expression, modern flow control and data structures, and a rich set of operators. C is not a "very high level" language, nor a "big" one, and is not specialized to any particular area of application.

But its absence of restrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than supposedly more powerful languages.