During the election and its immediate aftermath, critics declared Vance’s personal account of his impoverished childhood in Ohio an urgent sociological text. The memoir was nearly universally praised, becoming a staple of university reading programs and critics’ best-of lists. “Hillbilly Elegy” wasn’t just good; it was “essential.”
Vance was “a palatable messenger for information that people were sort of starting to figure out that they needed in that time. They needed to understand the Trump base, the Trump voter,” recalled Meghan Daum, who reviewed the memoir for the New York Times.
Within a couple of years — before Vance declared his intent to run for office in the 2022 elections, and even before Ron Howard’s film adaptation came out in 2020 — the public mood seemed to sour on the book.
“At a certain point, everyone just turned on it,” Daum said. “It’s hard to say why, though. People were mad at him because he was sort of doing the ‘up by the bootstraps’ thing. And showing any kind of understanding at all of people from those communities was suddenly so taboo.”
The criticism was bipartisan, Smith said. “I think on the right, it was more like, ‘Oh, wait, it’s just too simple and glib to say that J.D.’s book explains Trump. The Trump supporter isn’t just living in Appalachia.’”
As the Republican National Convention unfolded this week, some critics noted Vance’s shift away from the beliefs he’d espoused in the book.
Caption from article by Sophia Nguyen.
