J.D. Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was a hit. What happened?

Six years later, Vance was elected senator, and last week, Donald Trump selected him as his 2024 running mate, prompting many to revisit the memoir that catapulted Vance into public life — including critics that heaped praise on the book when it was published.

In retrospect, many view the book as having been designed as a springboard into a political career. (“J.D. Vance for President?” asked Vogue in 2017.) Yet when Emily Esfahani Smith filed her review to her editor at the Wall Street Journal that summer, she didn’t think of the book as particularly political.

“I just thought it was a really compelling story,” she said. Only during the editing process did Smith add a quick reference to how the book had been published “during an election in which much has been promised to white working-class voters.” Her review happened to run the week that Rod Dreher’s interview with the author crashed the website of the American Conservative, and as the book took off, “I had to come to the conclusion that, wow, this book is touching on a nerve.”

During the election and its immediate aftermath, critics declared Vance’s personal account of his impoverished childhood in Ohio an urgent sociological text. The memoir was nearly (nearly) universally praised, becoming a staple of university reading programs and critics’ best-of lists. “Hillbilly Elegy” wasn’t just good; it was “essential.”

Vance was “a palatable messenger for information that people were sort of starting to figure out that they needed in that time. They needed to understand the Trump base, the Trump voter,” recalled Meghan Daum, who reviewed the memoir for the New York Times.

Within a couple of years — before Vance declared his intent to run for office in 2022, and even before Ron Howard’s film adaptation came out in 2020 — the public mood seemed to sour on the book.

“At a certain point, everyone just turned on it,” Daum said. “It’s hard to say why, though. People were mad at him because he was sort of doing the ‘up by the bootstraps’ thing. And showing any kind of understanding at all of people from those communities was suddenly so taboo.”

The criticism was bipartisan, Smith said. “I think on the right, it was more like, ‘Oh, wait, it’s just too simple and glib to say that J.D.’s book explains Trump. The Trump supporter isn’t just living in Appalachia.’”

As the Republican National Convention unfolded this week, some critics noted Vance’s shift away from the beliefs he’d espoused in the book.

Slate critic Laura Miller wrote Tuesday: “All the qualities that made ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ one of the best books I read in 2016 — its brutal honesty, its challenges to the self-delusional and self-defeating aspects of hillbilly culture, its mournful ambivalence about the identity he’s only partially left behind — have been shamelessly jettisoned by Vance for the sake of his political career.” She added: “Nowhere in the book does Vance express concerns about immigrants, documented or otherwise, or the perfidy of the deep state.”

“He’s a very good writer. I have to say he’s a lot better writer than he is a speaker,” said Financial Times columnist Edward Luce, speaking over the phone the morning after Vance’s acceptance speech.

“Probably one of the reasons why ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ hit a chord was because he did in that book the opposite of what he did last night,” Luce said. “In 2016, it was, ‘We are to blame for a lot of our own 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 America. That was a complete U-turn from the moral of the story of ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’”

Their opinions of the author aside, do the critics think that “Hillbilly Elegy” still had something to say to America in 2024?

“It was an inspiring story. I learned a lot about a segment of America that I didn’t know very much about before I read the book. Those things totally still stand,” Smith said.

“It’s a good story. I think there’s a lot of people who don’t realize that this stuff goes on. Unfortunately, we’re in a moment that once you start talking about this demographic, people just shut down immediately,” Daum said, later adding, “I mean, this is not Tobias Wolff, okay? But there are a lot worse books.”

The vice-presidential nomination appears to have drawn in many new readers: “Hillbilly Elegy” surged to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list following Trump’s announcement Monday. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

But any who wish to wade into the literary debate may have to wait, at least on one platform: Goodreads temporarily blocked anyone from posting new ratings or reviews.