Hillbilly Elegy
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside.
Where Hillbilly Elegy keeps showing up
Two of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about Hillbilly Elegy
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A young Yale Law graduate writes about his Appalachian-rooted family in Middletown, Ohio, his unstable mother, the hard-as-nails grandmother who raised him, and the white working-class culture around them.
Hillbilly Elegy was written by JD Vance and published in 2016. It is a memoir of his Appalachian-Ohio upbringing and his path to Yale Law School. Vance later became a U.S. Senator and Vice President.
Yes. Ron Howard directed a 2020 Netflix film adaptation starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams, with Adams playing Vance's mother and Close his grandmother. The film received mixed reviews.
Hillbilly Elegy is 272 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Hillbilly Elegy takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Hillbilly Elegy is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Hillbilly Elegy is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
