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“Hillbilly Elegy,” the controversial memoir that catapulted Ohio Senator J.D. Vance to the national spotlight, is seeing a renewed boost in sales after former President Donald Trump selected the one-time venture capitalist as his running-mate.
Vance’s 2016 memoir was sitting at no. 220 on Amazon’s bestseller list on Monday morning, but after Trump announced the Ohio senator’s selection, the book jumped to number one, according to the Associated Press.
“Hillbilly Elegy” has sold more than 1.5 million copies to date — a number that some experts expect to increase quickly in the coming months.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Vance outsells Stephen King this year,” Allan Salkin, co-owner of the New Books Company, a podcast production company that discusses book publishing, told the Wall Street Journal.
The book recounts Vance’s family history in Kentucky and Ohio, while also analyzing the cultural and economic shifts that caused some white working class voters to change party affiliations from Democratic to Republican. Among the topics touched on in “Hillbilly Elegy” are drug addiction, government assistance and masculinity.
“I felt that if I wrote a very forthright, and sometimes painful, book, that it would open people’s eyes to the very real matrix of these problems,” Vance said in 2016. “Not as many people would pay attention to it [if they assumed] I was just another academic spouting off, and not someone who’s looked at these problems in a very personal way.”
Vance’s book initially attracted praise from the conservative media, in part due to his criticism of the welfare state and the “cultural habits” that he claimed kept rural whites in poverty. The memoir was subsequently cited in the liberal press as offering possible explanations for Trump’s victory in 2016.
In 2020, Ron Howard adapted “Hillbilly Elegy” into a movie starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close. The film was met with mixed reviews but received two Oscar nominations — a Best Supporting Actress nod for Close’s performance and Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
Some from the region, however, have been highly critical of Vance’s writing, arguing that he relied too heavily on generalizations and that his upbringing in suburban Ohio was not a true reflection of Appalachian life.
“‘Elegy’ is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class. Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles,” Sarah Jones, a journalist from the border of southwest Virginia and east Tennessee, wrote in the New Republic in 2016.
“I look at my home and see a region abandoned by the government elected to serve it,” she continued. “Central Appalachia is a sea of distress. If you are born where I grew up, you have to travel hundreds of miles to find a prosperous America. How do you get off the dole when there’s not enough work to go around? Frequently, you don’t.”