NEW YORK — In the heart of JD Vance journey from venture capitalist to vice presidential candidate is a memoir he first thought of in graduate school, “Hillbilly elegy.”
Vance’s best-selling book about his roots in rural Kentucky and Ohio factory worker made him a national celebrity shortly after its publication in the summer of 2016, and became a cultural talking point after Donald Trump’s stunning victory that November. O Ohio Republican since then it has been elected to the US Senate and, from Monday, chosen as Trump’s running mate in the former president’s search for a return to the White House.
In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance reflects on Appalachia’s transformation from reliably Democrat to reliably Republican, sharing stories about his chaotic family life and about communities that declined and seemed to lose hope. Now 39, Vance first thought of the book while studying at Yale Law School, and completed it at age 30, when it was finally published by HarperCollins.
“I was really bothered by the question of why weren’t there more kids like me at places like Yale…why isn’t there more upward mobility in the United States?” Vance told the Associated Press in 2016.
Sales of “Hillbilly Elegy” now total at least 1.6 million copies, according to Circana, which tracks about 85% of hardcover and paperback sales. Ron Howard adapted the book into a 2020 film of the same name, winning Glenn Close an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.
“I felt that if I wrote a very direct and sometimes painful book, it would open people’s eyes to the real matrix of this problem,” Vance told the AP in 2016. “If I wrote a more abstract or esoteric essay… so few people would pay attention to it, because they would assume I was just another academic talking trash, and not someone who looked at these problems in a very personal way.”
Vance’s book, subtitled “Memoirs of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” was initially praised by conservatives for his criticism of social welfare and what Vance considered “too many young people immune to hard work.” Reviewing “Hillbilly Elegy” in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher praised Vance’s claim that public policy does little to “affect the cultural habits that keep people poor.”
After Trump’s election, Vance’s book became an unofficial guide for liberals perplexed both by Trump’s rise and by the ties shared between some of the country’s poorest residents and the wealthy New York real estate turned television star.
The Washington Post initially dubbed Vance an ardent critic of Trump, “The Voice from the Rust Belt.”
At the same time, “Hillbilly Elegy” was heavily criticized, including by some from the Appalachian communities Vance was portraying. Common criticisms were that it devastated rural life and avoided the role of racism in politics.
Sarah Jones, writing in The New Republic that she grew up in poverty on the border between southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee, called the book a list of “myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.”
In The Guardian, Sarah Smarsh wrote that Vance offered a narrow perspective on American poverty.
“Most oppressed whites are not male conservative Appalachian Protestants,” Smarsh wrote. “That sometimes seems to be the only concept of them that the American consciousness can contain: hiding in a remote mountain shanty like a ghost covered in coal dust, as if white poverty weren’t always right in front of us, stealing our credit cards. credit at a Target in Denver or asking for money on the sidewalk in Los Angeles.”
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