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 began 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.
