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.
Instead, it did for Appalachia what James Dickey’s Deliverance did for rural Georgia, with its depiction of people of the backwoods as toothless, sodomizing inbreds.
The New York Times reviewed it twice—once in the daily and also in The New York Times Book Review, both raves—and it reached the top of their best-seller list in August 2016 and again in January 2017. According to Business Insider, Vance earned more than $800,000 in royalties in 2020 and 2021 alone, a whopping windfall for a first-time (or even a veteran) author. Since the V.P. announcement, Hillbilly Elegy has sold an additional 800,000 copies. As of this writing, it is the No. 1 best-selling book in the Amazon categories for biographies, memoirs, history, and politics.
Hillbilly Elegy got the Beverly Hillbillies treatment when, in 2017, Imagine Entertainment bought the rights to the book. The resulting film, produced by Brian Grazer and directed by Ron Howard, earned award nominations for Glenn Close (playing the matriarch, Mamaw), although the reviews were mixed, to say the least.
But despite his success, as a self-described hillbilly turned venture capitalist turned politician—and a former Never Trumper turned Trump-V.P. pick—you might say that J. D. Vance has an authenticity problem. How authentic is Vance and his story of growing up in an Appalachian hellscape, and did that authenticity extend to the author himself? Did Vance have help writing the book, and if so, how much?
Three editors worked on Hillbilly Elegy, none of whom wished to be interviewed for this piece. The book was published by HarperCollins, whose longtime publisher, Jonathan Burnham, I happen to know personally, having published three books with him. Did Vance write it himself?, I asked.
Burnham immediately answered our query in an e-mail. “I’d love to speak to you but we’re locked down on this, given the high stakes,” he wrote, adding, “He very much did.”
There are several ways to spot a ghost, such as shifts in authorial style and voice, and noticeable improvements in the author’s prose. Since Hillbilly Elegy is Vance’s first and only book, however, it’s hard to make such comparisons, especially as he’d previously written only conservative opinion pieces and press releases as a media-relations officer with the Marines.
But his comments over the past several years seem surprising from an occasionally eloquent writer, such as his now infamous comment about “childless cat ladies,” who, in his view, shouldn’t have an equal stake in America’s future. (Does that include Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers?, one wonders.) There’s nothing especially writerly about his written prose, before or after Hillbilly Elegy. And his speech at the Republican National Convention was, to our ears, devoid of both narrative and poetry.
Hillbilly Elegy promised not only to evoke a literary tale of nostalgia for a lost Appalachian community but to explain why struggling men and women might turn to Donald Trump for salvation.
In his acknowledgments, Vance thanked a legion of helpers, most prominently his contract-law professor at Yale University, Amy Chua, who is also the best-selling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, among other books. In 2011, Chua was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, and one of the people she most influenced was Vance. He described her as his “authorial godmother,” who first encouraged him to write down the stories of his beleaguered family life.
In the beginning, Vance sheepishly sent Chua fragments and anecdotes, which he at first thought might “be crap,” as he told The Atlantic in 2017, in a joint interview with Chua about mentorship. But the “Tiger Mom” encouraged him to keep going, and so the pages kept coming. Chua got him an agent, and her first stab at a blurb was so fulsome (“the best book I ever read in my life”) that the publisher begged her to tone it down.
Buried at the end of a long list of helpers is the billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist and arch-conservative Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. Vance’s first job after graduating from Yale was secured by Thiel, who saw something in the ambitious, smart young man with the hardscrabble background. Thiel later contributed $15 million to Vance’s race for a Senate seat from Ohio.
What could be better, as the Republican Party continues to court blue-collar workers, than a millennial entrepreneur (at 39, Vance’s net worth is somewhere around $10 million) from an impoverished childhood marred by family dysfunction and misery? J. D. Vance seems to have been engineered for political success by powerful and connected mentors, with Hillbilly Elegy as his calling card.
At first, Republicans and Democrats alike were seduced by the book, despite the boilerplate-conservative conclusions that Vance lands upon toward the end. But he touched a lot of nerves when he ascribed the ongoing issues of poverty, drug addiction, and alcoholism to laziness and lack of ambition.
That didn’t sit well with a lot of people, especially those from Appalachia, who have seen mines, factories, and logging operations abandon their communities, leaving little behind. The writer Meredith McCarroll, who co-edited an essay collection titled Appalachian Reckoning in response to Vance’s memoir, said in an interview for NPR, “I am from western North Carolina, identify very much as Appalachian.” But when Vance “is implicating this broad 13-state region, he is playing into the stereotype of the lazy, violent mountaineers who can’t quite be trusted to take care of themselves.”
And just this week, Riley Crabtree, an opinion writer for The Columbus Dispatch, in Vance’s home state of Ohio, wrote a column titled “I’m from Appalachia. JD Vance Isn’t. He Got Our Story Wrong.” She notes that she was attracted to the memoir because “I have a natural affinity for so-called hillbillies,” but when she read the memoir, she “was aghast at the depiction of my community.”
“Vance’s family hadn’t lived in Kentucky since right after World War II. He spent time in Kentucky during holidays and over summers,” Crabtree writes. “While there are moments of admiration, he insinuated Appalachians were stubborn folks with no value and no real culture, fueled by drugs, self-pity and lack of motivation to work hard.”
Another question many writers have is why there was no sequel to Hillbilly Elegy, unusual for a best-selling writer. In fact, there was. A page for “A Relevant Faith: Searching for a Meaningful American Christianity” simply appeared on HarperCollins’s Web site and on Amazon. The book, which was never formally announced, was canceled without explanation in May 2022. All that is known about it is the title, which, as titles go, is definitely no Hillbilly Elegy.
Could Vance have merely provided the tales of his rough childhood in Middletown, Ohio, and then had extensive, professional help shaping them into a cohesive and compelling narrative? That happens all the time in publishing, particularly with books by politicians and political hopefuls. But Hillbilly Elegy struck many readers as a different sort of book—a more honest one.
Another question many writers have is why there was no sequel to Hillbilly Elegy, unusual for a best-selling writer. In fact, there was, but it was canceled.
Sometimes the acknowledgments page can lend a clue. Besides three editors, Vance lists dozens of mentors, friends, and readers, most importantly, perhaps, his wife, Usha, who had been the star of their law class at Yale, where they met. Another law-school friend was Charles Tyler, one of the first to see an early draft of Hillbilly Elegy.
“I think that he got the contract when we were in our third year of law school,” Tyler says. “Five or six of the biggest publishing houses were in competition for his manuscript. That was big news in our law-school class of 175 students.”
Tyler reviewed an early draft of the manuscript. “It was barely far along. A lot changed between the first draft and the last…. He was living in Ohio or Kentucky, I’m not sure which side of the line.… He asked for any comments I had. I wrote down lots and lots and lots of notes. We talked about it for several hours.” Tyler says he gave Vance line edits. “I’m sure he had scores of people who did that. I’m sure that the manuscript at the sentence level was improved by having so many eyes on it. But I suspect if you ask him is it really his work, he’d say yes.”
Perhaps Vance wanted Tyler’s help because they share a cultural background. “It’s both for and about poor white America, particularly the people who live in the East, the South and the Appalachian region,” Tyler says. “I was raised in a Southern Baptist household. I have cousins who live in trailer parks. The book is in some ways about my family as much as it is about his…. It was published at a moment in time when there was all this attention paid to the people who elected Donald Trump.”
Tyler advised Vance against “generalizing about whites that live in the South,” telling his friend, “People from where I grew up would have no idea what you’re talking about. There’s a section about his grandmother occasionally going to church [where there’s] speaking in tongues and handling snakes. If you’re going to include that, I said, you need to de-emphasize it a lot. I went to church every Sunday of my upbringing, and I’d never seen what you’re talking about.”
Tyler admired the book, but he found Vance’s commentary on how to fix the problems of Appalachia “less interesting.... I heard that he was advised on the really early drafts to write less commentary and more of his personal experiences. His stories are what sells the reader, and not all his commentary.”
Vance’s success as a first-time author was surprising because Tyler “only knew him in the context of law school, the everyday things you talk about, trying to keep the mood light, so you would have no idea that he had that capability.… He was sort of well liked but not regarded as the rock star of our law class, the way his wife, Usha, was. Usha was incredibly smart.”
The book’s editors include Tim Duggan, now a vice president and executive editor at Henry Holt, who acquired the book and edited the first few chapters, but he left HarperCollins soon after. A senior editor at St. Martin’s and a friend of Duggan’s tells us, “It’s pretty clear Tim wants to stay away from it since he was only involved at earlier stages.”
The book was then turned over to Jonathan Jao, now at Simon & Schuster. I asked him to describe what it was like to work with Vance, but Jao e-mailed us that he has a policy of not commenting on authors he’s worked with or their books.
The writer Sofia Groopman also worked on the book, before leaving publishing to become a fellow at the University of Michigan, where she earned her M.F.A. Groopman “gave the book a fresh eye when it was desperately needed,” Vance wrote. Several requests for comment from Groopman have gone unanswered.
“I understand why you’re finding it difficult to find people willing to talk to you,” Tyler says. “I’m well aware that your piece could potentially harm me. You never know how these things will be interpreted. I’m a law professor, and the law professoriat is extremely left-leaning, and so just being mentioned in the same sentence as J. D. Vance is a professional liability.”
Whether Hillbilly Elegy is the work of a sole author, such as Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, or the work of a ghost, like John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (which in fact was written by Kennedy’s speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen), or, like many best-selling memoirs, something in between, is likely to remain a mystery.
But one thing is for sure: none of Hillbilly Elegy’s early readers or reviewers could have known that they were helping to position its author to be picked as Donald Trump’s running mate just eight years after the book’s publication.
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL.Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
