Author | J. D. Vance |
---|---|
Language | English |
Subject | Rural sociology, poverty, family drama |
Published | June 2016 (Harper Press) |
Publisher | Harper |
Pages | 264 |
Awards | 2017 Audie Award for Nonfiction |
ISBN | 978-0-06-230054-6 |
OCLC | 952097610 |
LC Class | HD8073.V37 |
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a bestselling 2016 memoir by J. D. Vance about the Appalachian values of his Kentucky family and the social and socioeconomic problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, where his mother's parents moved when they were young.
In 2020 it was adapted into a film directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
Vance describes his upbringing and family background while growing up in the city of Middletown, Ohio. He writes about a family history of poverty and low-paying, physical jobs that have since disappeared or worsened in their guarantees, and compares this life with his perspective after leaving it.
Though Vance was raised in Middletown, his mother and her family were from Breathitt County, Kentucky. Their Appalachian values include traits like loyalty and love of country, despite social issues including violence and verbal abuse. He recounts his grandparents' alcoholism and abuse, and his unstable mother's history of drug addictions and failed relationships. Vance's grandparents eventually reconciled and became his de facto guardians. He was pushed by his tough but loving grandmother, and eventually Vance was able to leave Middletown to attend Ohio State University and Yale Law School. [1]
Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. Comparatively, he feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role. To lend credence to his argument, Vance regularly relies on personal experience. As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled, especially combined with his values of personal responsibility and tough love, is presented as a microcosm of the reason for Appalachia's overall political swing from strong Democratic Party to strong Republican affiliations. Likewise, he recounts stories intended to showcase a lack of work ethic including the story of a man who quit after expressing dislike over his job's hours and posted to social media about the "Obama economy", as well as a co-worker, with a pregnant girlfriend, who would skip work. [1]
The book was popularized by an interview with the author published by The American Conservative in late July 2016. The volume of requests briefly disabled the website. Halfway through the next month, The New York Times wrote that the title had remained in the top ten Amazon bestsellers since the interview's publication. [1]
Vance credits his Yale contract law professor Amy Chua as the "authorial godmother" of the book. [2]
The book reached the top of The New York Times Best Seller list in August 2016 [3] and January 2017. [4]
American Conservative contributor and blogger Rod Dreher expressed admiration for Hillbilly Elegy, saying that Vance "draws conclusions… that may be hard for some people to take. But Vance has earned the right to make those judgments. This was his life. He speaks with authority that has been extremely hard won." [5] The following month, Dreher posted about his theories about why liberals loved the book. [6] New York Post columnist and editor of Commentary John Podhoretz described the book as among the year's most provocative. [7] The book was positively received by conservatives such as National Review columnist Mona Charen [8] and National Review editor and Slate columnist Reihan Salam. [9]
By contrast, other journalists criticized Vance for generalizing too much from his personal upbringing in suburban Ohio. [10] [11] [12] [13] Jared Yates Sexton of Salon criticized Vance for his "damaging rhetoric" and for endorsing policies used to "gut the poor". He argues that Vance "totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class's opposition to President Obama." [14] Sarah Jones of The New Republic mocked Vance as "the false prophet of Blue America," dismissing him as "a flawed guide to this world" and the book as little more than "a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class." [11] Historian Bob Hutton wrote in Jacobin that Vance's argument relied on circular logic and eugenics, ignored existing scholarship on Appalachian poverty, and was "primarily a work of self-congratulation." [10] Sarah Smarsh with The Guardian noted that "most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia" and called into question Vance's generalizations about the white working class from his personal upbringing. [12]
The New York Times wrote that Vance's direct confrontation of a social taboo is admirable regardless of whether the reader agrees with his conclusions. The newspaper writes that Vance's subject is despair, and his argument is more generous in that it blames fatalism and learned helplessness rather than indolence. [1]
A 2017 Brookings Institution report noted that, "J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy became a national bestseller for its raw, emotional portrait of growing up in and eventually out of a poor rural community riddled by drug addiction and instability." Vance's account anecdotally confirmed the report's conclusion that family stability is essential to upward mobility. [15]
The book provoked a response in the form of an anthology, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. The essays in the volume criticize Vance for making broad generalizations and reproducing myths about poverty. [13]
A key reason for Hillbilly Elegy's widespread popularity following its publication in 2016 was its role in explaining Donald Trump's rise to the top of the Republican Party. [16] In particular, it purported to explain why white working class voters became attracted to Trump as a political leader. [17] Vance himself offered commentary on how his book provides perspective on why a voter from the "hillbilly" demographic would support Trump. [18] Although he does not mention Trump in the book, Vance openly criticized the now-former president while discussing his memoir in interviews following its release. [19] However, Vance walked these comments back when he joined the 2022 U.S. Senate race in Ohio and now openly embraces Trumpism. [20] [21]
A film adaptation was released in select theaters in the United States on November 11, 2020, then digitally on Netflix on November 24. It was directed by Ron Howard and stars Glenn Close, Amy Adams, Gabriel Basso [22] [23] and Haley Bennett. Although a few days of filming were planned for the book's setting of Middletown, Ohio, [24] much of the filming in the summer of 2019 was in Atlanta, Clayton and Macon, Georgia, using the code name "IVAN." [25] [26]
Hillbilly is a term for people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas in the United States, primarily in the Appalachian region and Ozarks. As people migrated out of the region during the Great Depression, the term spread northward and westward with them.
Middletown is a city located in Butler and Warren counties in the southwestern part of the U.S. state of Ohio. The population as of the 2020 census was 50,987. It is part of the Cincinnati metropolitan area, located 29 miles (47 km) northeast of Cincinnati and 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Dayton.
The American Conservative (TAC) is a magazine published by the American Ideas Institute which was founded in 2002. Originally published twice a month, it was reduced to monthly publication in August 2009, and since February 2013, it has been published once every two months.
Timothy John Ryan is an American politician who served as a U.S. representative for Ohio from 2003 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented Ohio's 13th congressional district from 2013 to 2023, having previously represented Ohio's 17th congressional district from 2003 to 2013. Ryan's district included a large swath of northeastern Ohio, from Youngstown to Akron. He was the Democratic nominee in the 2022 United States Senate election in Ohio.
The Miami Valley is the land area surrounding the Great Miami River in southwest Ohio, USA, and includes the Little Miami, Mad, and Stillwater rivers as well. Geographically, it includes Dayton, Springfield, Middletown, Hamilton, and other communities. The name is derived from the Miami Indians.
AK Steel Holdings Corporation was a steelmaking company headquartered in West Chester Township, Ohio. The company, whose name was derived from the initials of Armco, its predecessor company, and Kawasaki Steel Corporation, was acquired by Cleveland-Cliffs in 2020.
Middletown High School is a public high school in Middletown, Ohio. It is the only public high school in the Middletown City School District.
Robert Schuler was a Republican politician who formerly served in the Ohio General Assembly. Schuler first entered politics in the late 1970s as a member of the Deer Park City Council and also spent four years as a Sycamore Township trustee from 1988 to 1992. Initially running for the Ohio House of Representatives in 1992, he went on to win reelection in 1994, 1996, and 1998. With term limits in effect, Schuler was ineligible to run for a fifth term in 2000, and was succeeded by Michelle G. Schneider.
Raymond Oliver Dreher Jr., known as Rod Dreher, is an American expatriate writer and editor living in Hungary. He was a columnist with The American Conservative for 12 years, ending in March 2023, and remains an editor-at-large there. He is also author of several books, including How Dante Can Save Your Life, The Benedict Option, and Live Not by Lies. He has written about religion, politics, film, and culture in National Review and National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
The Appalachian region and its people have historically been stereotyped by observers, with the basic perceptions of Appalachians painting them as backwards, rural, and anti-progressive. These widespread, limiting views of Appalachia and its people began to develop in the post-Civil War; Those who "discovered" Appalachia found it to be a very strange environment, and depicted its "otherness" in their writing. These depictions have persisted and are still present in common understandings of Appalachia today, with a particular increase of stereotypical imagery during the late 1950s and early 1960s in sitcoms. Common Appalachian stereotypes include those concerning economics, appearance, and the caricature of the "hillbilly."
The 2018 United States Senate election in Ohio took place November 6, 2018. The candidate filing deadline was February 7, 2018; the primary election was held May 8, 2018. Incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown—the only remaining elected Democratic statewide officeholder in Ohio at the time of the election—won his reelection bid for a third term, defeating Republican U.S. Representative Jim Renacci in the general election.
James David Vance is an American venture capitalist, author, and politician serving as the junior United States senator from Ohio since 2023. A member of the Republican Party, he came to prominence with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
Jared Yates Sexton is an American author and political commentator from Linton, Indiana. He was an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University.
Hillbilly Elegy is a 2020 American drama film directed by Ron Howard from a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, It is based on the 2016 memoir of the same name, by J. D. Vance. The film stars Amy Adams, Glenn Close, Gabriel Basso, Haley Bennett, Freida Pinto, Bo Hopkins, and Owen Asztalos.
Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations is a book by American legal scholar Amy Chua. It was published in February, 2018, and covers the topic of how loyalty to groups can be more important than ideology, and applies this idea to both failures of American foreign policy abroad and the rise of Donald Trump within the United States.
Reihan Morshed Salam is a conservative American political commentator, columnist and author who since 2019 has been president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He was previously executive editor of National Review, a columnist for Slate, a contributing editor at National Affairs, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, an interviewer for VICE and a fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
The 2024 United States Senate election in Ohio will be held on November 5, 2024, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the state of Ohio. Primary elections took place on March 19, 2024. Incumbent Democratic Sherrod Brown is seeking a fourth term in office. Former luxury car dealer Bernie Moreno is the Republican nominee. This race is one of three 2024 U.S. Senate races in which Democratic senators are seeking re-election in states where Republican Donald Trump won both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Brown's re-election is considered essential for Democrats' chances to retain the Senate majority in 2024.
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a 2018 non-fiction book by American journalist Sarah Smarsh. The book contains events from her life and the lives of her relatives, and it focuses on cycles of poverty and social class in the U.S. state of Kansas. Heartland was a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2018 and a 2019 recipient of the Kansas Notable Book Award.
The 2022 United States Senate election in Ohio was held on November 8, 2022, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the State of Ohio. Republican writer and venture capitalist J. D. Vance defeated Democratic U.S. Representative Tim Ryan to succeed retiring incumbent Republican Rob Portman.
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