J.D. Vance

J.D. Vance is an American author and politician whose Hillbilly Elegy — a memoir about growing up in the Appalachian rust belt — became one of the most discussed American political memoirs of the 2010s and a cultural Rorschach test.

J.D. Vance published Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, a memoir about growing up in Middletown, Ohio — a rust belt town whose population had descended primarily from Appalachian Kentucky — and in Breathitt County, Kentucky, itself. The book describes family dysfunction, substance abuse (particularly his mother’s opioid addiction), poverty, and the social and cultural conditions of working-class white America that left many communities devastated by deindustrialization.

Hillbilly Elegy was immediately seized upon as an explanation for Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in the 2016 election: it appeared to provide an account of a population that many coastal Americans didn’t understand. This context made it one of the most discussed American books of its decade, and also generated significant criticism. Critics argued that Vance attributed to cultural failures conditions that were better explained by policy choices, and that his framework shifted responsibility from institutions to individuals and communities.

The book’s literary qualities are genuine: the portrait of his grandmother Mamaw, who provided the stability and encouragement that allowed him to attend Ohio State and eventually Yale Law School, is memorably drawn. Vance himself has become a political figure — elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 2022 and chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate in 2024 — which has complicated retrospective readings of the memoir. It remains a significant document of a particular American social moment, whatever one thinks of its analysis.