United States, Memoirs, State & Local, Poverty, Ethnic Studies, Rural, Class, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Sociology, History, Autobiography, Adult 

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town 

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck.

The Vance family story begins with hope in postwar America. J.D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country. 

James David Vance (born James Donald Bowman) is an American politician, lawyer, veteran, and a New York Times bestselling author, who has served as the junior United States senator from Ohio since 2023. A member of the Republican Party, he is the party's nominee for vice president in the 2024 election.

After graduating from high school in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, Vance served from 2003 to 2007 as a combat correspondent, with six months in Iraq. He then attended Ohio State University, graduating in 2009. He graduated from Yale Law School in 2013. His 2016 bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy got significant press attention during the 2016 election and became a feature film in 2020. It describes his upbringing in the Rust Belt, poverty, drug addiction, and Appalachian culture.

Vance defeated Democratic nominee Tim Ryan in the 2022 United States Senate election in Ohio. Initially opposed to Donald Trump's candidacy in the 2016 election, Vance has since become a strong Trump supporter. On July 15, 2024, Trump nominated Vance as his running mate at the Republican National Convention. He is the first US Marine veteran to be nominated for vice president.