THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE
DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL
BASSO
"You will not read a more important book about America this
year."--The Economist
"A riveting book."--The Wall Street Journal
"Essential reading."--David Brooks, New York Times
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of
growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look
at the struggles of America's white working class
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in
crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this
group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating
over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm,
but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J.
D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class
decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
The Vance family story begins hopefully 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 their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law
School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational
upward mobility.
But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that
this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt,
uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with
the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully
escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so
characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he
himself still carries around the demons of their 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.
