At the heart of JD Vance’s swift journey from venture capitalist to vice presidential candidate is a memoir he first thought of in law school, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Vance’s bestseller about his roots in rural Kentucky and blue-collar Ohio made him a national celebrity soon after its publication in the summer of 2016, and became a cultural talking point after Donald Trump’s stunning victory that November.
The Ohio Republican has since been elected to the U.S. Senate and, as of Monday, chosen as Trump’s running mate in the former president’s quest for a return to the White House. He is 39, and would be the youngest vice president since Richard Nixon, who served two terms under Dwight Eisenhower, starting in 1953.
In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance reflects on the transformation of Appalachia from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican, sharing stories about his chaotic family life and about communities that had declined and seemed to lose hope. Vance first thought of the book while studying at Yale Law School, and completed it in his early 30s, when it was eventually published by HarperCollins.
“I was very bugged by this question of why there weren’t 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 for “Hillbilly Elegy” now total at least 1.6 million copies, according to Circana, which tracks around 85% of hardcover and paperback sales. Ron Howard adapted the book into a 2020 movie of the same name, earning Glenn Close an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Within hours of Trump’s announcement Monday, it was No. 1 on Amazon.com, surging from No. 220 earlier in the day.
“I felt that if I wrote a very forthright, and sometimes painful, book, that it would open people’s eyes to the very real matrix of these problem,” Vance told the AP in 2016. “If I wrote a more abstract or esoteric essay ... then not as many people would pay attention to it because they would assume I was just another academic spouting off, and not someone who’s looked at these problems in a very personal way.”
Vance’s book, subtitled “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” was initially praised by conservatives for its criticisms of welfare and what Vance saw as “too many young men immune to hard work.” Reviewing “Hillbilly Elegy” in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher praised Vance’s contention 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 baffled both by Trump’s rise and by the bonds shared between some of the country’s poorest residents and the wealthy New York real estate man turned TV star.
The Washington Post dubbed Vance, initially a fervent critic of Trump, “The Voice of the Rust Belt.”
At the same time, “Hillbilly Elegy” was heavily criticized, including by some from the Appalachian communities Vance was portraying. Common critiques were that it flattened rural life and sidestepped the role of racism in politics.
Sarah Jones, writing in The New Republic that she grew up in poverty on the border of 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 downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia,” Smarsh wrote. “That sometimes seems the only concept of them that the American consciousness can contain: tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a coal-dust-covered ghost, as though white poverty isn’t always right in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.”
