Associated Press writers Hillel Italia
NEW YORK (AP) — At the center of J.D. Vance's meteoric rise from venture capitalist to vice presidential candidate is a memoir he first conceived while in law school: “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Vance rose to national prominence soon after the publication of his bestselling book about his rural Kentucky and working-class Ohio roots in the summer of 2016, and became a cultural talking point after Donald Trump's shock victory in November of that year. The Ohio Republican was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate, and as of Monday was selected as Trump's running mate in his bid to return to the White House. At 39, Vance will be the youngest vice president since Richard Nixon, who served two terms under Dwight Eisenhower from 1953 to 2016.
In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance reflects on Appalachia's transformation from Democratic to Republican dominance, telling the story of his own chaotic family life and a community that seemed in decline and lost hope. Vance conceived the book while at Yale Law School, finished it in his early 30s, and eventually published it with HarperCollins.
“I was really troubled by the question of why there weren't more students like me at universities like Yale, why there weren't more opportunities for advancement in the United States,” Vance told The Associated Press in 2016.
“Hillbilly Elegy” has now sold at least 1.6 million copies, according to Circana, which tracks about 85% of hardcover and paperback sales. Director Ron Howard adapted the book into a 2020 movie of the same name, which earned Glenn Close an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Within hours of Trump's announcement on Monday, the book rose to No. 1 on Amazon.com, jumping from No. 220 earlier in the day.
“I felt that if I wrote a very frank and sometimes painful book, I could open people's eyes to the very real structure of these issues,” Vance told The Associated Press in 2016. “If I had written more abstract or esoteric essays, people would think I was just another academic, not someone who looks at these issues from a very personal perspective, and not as many people would pay attention to it.”
Subtitled “Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis,” Vance's book was initially praised by conservatives for its criticism of welfare and what Vance saw as “too many young people who dislike hard work.” Reviewing “Hillbilly Elegy” in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher praised Vance's argument that public policy does little to “impact the cultural habits that keep people impoverished.”
Since Trump's election, Mr. Vance's book has become an unofficial guidebook for liberals puzzled by both his rise and the ties between some of the country's poorest people and a wealthy New York real estate dealer who became a TV star.
The Washington Post called Vance, who was initially an ardent critic of President Trump, “the voice of the Rust Belt.”
At the same time, Hillbilly Elegy received harsh criticism, including from some in the Appalachian communities Vance portrayed, with the common criticism being that it flattened rural life and avoided the role of racism in politics.
Sarah Jones, who grew up in poverty on the border of southwest Virginia and eastern Tennessee, wrote in The New Republic that the book was “a list that repackages the welfare queen myth as a white working-class primer.”
The Guardian's Sarah Smash wrote that Vance presents a narrow view of poverty in America.
“Most downtrodden whites are not conservative Protestant men from Appalachia,” Smarsh writes. “The only concept the American consciousness has of them is as coal-dusted ghosts hiding in remote mountain shacks, swiping credit cards at a Denver Target or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk, as if white poverty wasn't always staring them in the face.”
