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
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in
crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of
this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than
forty years, has been reported 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 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.
