JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” was a hit. What happened?

Six years later, Vance was elected senator, and last week Donald Trump named him his vice presidential running mate for 2024. Many have reread the memoir that catapulted Vance into public life, including critics who hailed the book upon its release.

Looking back, many see the book as a springboard for a political career. (“JD Vance for President?” asked Vogue in 2017.) But when Emily Esfahani Although Smith submitted her review to her editor at the Wall Street Journal this summer, she did not consider the book to be particularly political.

“I just found the story really compelling,” she said. It was only during the editing process that Smith added a brief note that the book was “published during an election in which a lot was promised to white, working-class voters.” Her review happened to appear the week that Rod Dreher’s interview with the author crashed the American Conservative website, and as the book gained momentum, “I had to conclude that this book hits a sore spot.”

During the election and immediately afterward, critics declared Vance’s personal account of his childhood in poverty in Ohio an urgent sociological text. The memoir was almost (nearly) was widely praised and became a staple of college reading programs and critics’ best-of lists. Hillbilly Elegy wasn’t just good; it was “essential.”

Vance was “a pleasant messenger of information that people were beginning to realize at that time that they needed. They needed to understand the Trump base, the Trump voters,” recalls Meghan Daum, who reviewed the memoir for The New York Times.

Within a few years—before Vance announced his intention to run for public office in 2022, and even before Ron Howard’s film adaptation came out in 2020—public sentiment toward the book seemed to be worsening.

“At a certain point, everyone turned against it,” said Daum. “It’s hard to say why, though. People were angry with him because he had worked his way up on his own, so to speak. And showing any understanding for people from these communities was suddenly so taboo.”

The criticism came from both parties, Smith said. “I think on the right it was more like, ‘Oh, wait, it’s just too simplistic and superficial to say that JD’s book explains Trump. The Trump supporter doesn’t just live in Appalachia.'”

During the Republican National Convention This week, some critics noted Vance’s departure from the beliefs he had expressed in the book.

Slate critic Laura Miller wrote on Tuesday: “All the qualities that made ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ one of the best books I read in 2016 – its brutal honesty, its examination of the self-deluding and self-destructive aspects of hillbilly culture, its sad ambivalence about the identity he has only partially left behind – Vance has shamelessly jettisoned for the sake of his political career.” She added: “Nowhere in the book does Vance express concern about immigrants – whether documented or undocumented – or the villainy of the deep state.”

“He is a very good writer. I must say he is a much better writer than speaker,” Financial Times columnist Edward Luce said by phone the morning after Vance’s acceptance speech.

“Probably one of the reasons ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ struck a nerve was that in that book he did the opposite of what he did last night,” Luce said. “In 2016, it was, ‘We are responsible for much of our predicament.’ Last night he was a victim, and they were all victims of neoliberalism on Wall Street and the larger forces of capitalism and indifference to middle-class America. That was a complete reversal from the moral of the story of ‘Hillbilly Elegy.'”

Do critics believe that Hillbilly Elegy has anything to say to America in 2024, beyond their opinion of the author?

“It was an inspiring story. I learned a lot about a part of America that I didn’t know much about before reading the book. Those things still hold true,” Smith said.

“It’s a good story. I think a lot of people don’t know that this kind of thing happens. Unfortunately, we’re in a situation where people immediately switch off when you start talking about this target group,” Daum said, later adding: “I mean, this isn’t Tobias Wolff, OK? But there are much worse books.”

The vice presidential nomination appears to have attracted many new readers: “Hillbilly Elegy” shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list after Trump’s announcement on Monday. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.)

But anyone who wants to participate in the literary debate may have to wait on at least one platform: Goodreads has temporarily blocked the posting of new ratings or reviews.