‘Hillbilly Elegy’: JD Vance’s rise to vice presidential candidate began with a bestselling memoir
NEW YORK — In the middle of JD Vance’s journey from venture capitalist to candidate for vice president is a memoir he first thought of while still a student, “Hillbilly elegy.”
Vance’s bestseller about his roots in rural Kentucky and workers ohio made him a national celebrity and a cultural talking point soon after its publication in the summer of 2016 Donald Trump’s Stunning Victory that november. The Republican from Ohio has been since then elected to the U.S. Senate and from Monday, chosen as Trump’s running mate in the former president’s bid to return to the White House.
In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance reflects on Appalachia’s transformation from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican, sharing stories of his chaotic family life and of communities that had fallen into disrepair and seemed to be losing hope. Now 39, Vance first thought of the book while a student at Yale Law School, and completed it in his early thirties, eventually being published by HarperCollins.
“I was very irritated by the question of why aren’t there more kids like me in schools 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 stand at at least 1.6 million copies, according to Circana, which tracks about 85 percent of hardcover and paperback sales. Ron Howard adapted the book into a 2020 film of the same name, Glenn Close earn an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
“I felt that if I wrote a very candid and sometimes painful book, it would open people’s eyes to the very real matrix of these issues,” Vance told the AP in 2016. “If I wrote a more abstract or esoteric essay … not as many people would pay attention to it, because they would assume I was just another academic making noise, and not someone who has looked at these issues in a very personal way.”
Vance’s book, subtitled “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” was initially praised by conservatives because of criticism of Social Security and what Vance saw as “too many young men immune to hard work.” In a review of “Hillbilly Elegy” in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher praised Vance argues that government policies do little to affect “the cultural practices that keep people poor.”
After Trump’s election, Vance’s book an unofficial guide for liberals stunned by both Trump’s rise and the ties between some of the country’s poorest residents and the wealthy New York realtor turned TV star.
The Washington Post initially called Vance a staunch critic of Trump, “The Voice of the Rust Belt.”
At the same time, “Hillbilly Elegy” was heavily criticized, including by some of the Appalachians Vance portrayed. Common criticisms 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 “welfare queen myths repackaged as a manual for the white working class.”
In The Guardian, Sarah Smarsh wrote that Vance offered a limited perspective on American poverty.
“Most oppressed whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia,” Smarsh wrote. “That sometimes seems the only concept of them the American consciousness can grasp: tucked away in a remote cabin in the mountains like a coal-dust-covered ghost, as if white poverty weren’t always right in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or asking for money on a sidewalk in Los Angeles.”
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