No sooner had J. D. Vance been chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate and anointed as the future of MAGA that attention turned to his phenomenally successful, best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, first published in 2016 and rarely straying from Amazon’s list of best-sellers.
For many, it was the title that first drew us in: a poet’s title, a writer’s title. Hillbilly Elegy promised not only to evoke a literary tale of nostalgia for a lost Appalachian community but to shed light on rural America’s stubborn pockets of poverty and societal despair, and to explain why struggling men and women might turn to Donald Trump for salvation.
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