Hillbilly Elegy: Introduction Summary & Analysis

J.D. Vance begins his memoir by confessing that he still finds it absurd that anybody would want to buy his book. He writes that he’s thirty-one and hasn’t accomplished anything truly fantastic or extraordinary in his life. Yes, he graduated from Yale Law School—something he never could have imagined as a boy—but many people graduate from Yale every year. Vance tells readers that he isn’t a politician or the innovative founder of a billion-dollar company, so he didn’t write Hillbilly Elegy because of his accomplishments. Rather, he wrote the book to help people “understand what happens in the lives of the poor.” Having grown up poor in an Ohio town in America’s Rust Belt, his prospects were “grim.” Nonetheless, he found a way to beat the odds and, because of that, now wants to show the world “how upward mobility really feels.”

Vance briefly outlines the demographic history of America’s white working class. He makes clear that racial categories are unhelpful when it comes to understanding the kind of poverty he comes from, saying that, though he is white, he doesn’t identify with “the WASPs of the Northeast.” Rather, he comes from “the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.” For these people, he writes, “poverty is the family tradition,” and they have incredibly strong cultural values, which outside observers have characterized as “persistent” and “unchanging.” Loyalty is one of these values, an intense “cultural tradition” that sometimes goes too far, causing hillbillies—as Vance calls them—to distrust outsiders or different ways of thinking.

The first Scots-Irish immigrants to live in the United States arrived in the 18th century and found themselves drawn to the Appalachian Mountains, which run from Alabama to parts of New York state. Although this region is quite large, Vance remarks that “the culture of Greater Appalachia is remarkably cohesive.” Unfortunately, though, the region is currently plagued by “low social mobility,” “poverty, “divorce,” and “drug addiction.” As a result, the white working class has developed a deep sense of pessimism, a cynicism that studies have shown surpasses that of any other group in America. While Vance agrees that “reality permits some degree of cynicism,” he believes something else is going on—something about the hillbilly attitude is fueling this pessimism in an unproductive manner.

The summer before he attended Yale Law School, Vance took a job at a local floor tile distributing company, where he hauled heavy materials with eleven other employees. The work was exhausting, but he needed the money before moving to New Haven, and the pay and benefits were good. A few months after he started, a nineteen-year-old boy came looking for a job to support his pregnant girlfriend. The manager not only hired him, but also gave his girlfriend an administrative position. But it wasn’t long before the girlfriend regularly stopped attending work. She was eventually fired. The boy stayed on, though he himself skipped work at least once a week and took four bathroom breaks per day, often for more than thirty minutes at a time. When he too was fired, he was incensed, yelling at his manager: “How could you do this to me? Don’t you know I’ve got a pregnant girlfriend?”

This nineteen-year-old imminent father was no anomaly: two other people were fired from or quit their jobs at the tile factory during the short time Vance worked there. Vance believes stories like these indicate that something troubling is going on in working-class America. While economists worry that the industrial Midwest is in decline due to the fact that manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, Vance points out that there is another problem afoot in Appalachia. He writes that Hillbilly Elegy is about “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible,” a book that reveals “a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” His time in the tile business showed him that young hillbillies are not taking responsibility for their situations, preferring instead to blame their misfortune on other people or on abstract structures of power.

Vance reiterates that Hillbilly Elegy is a book that draws upon his own experiences. He isn’t an academic, he writes, nor is he unbiased. Although his memoir takes into account certain statistics and generalizations, he primarily relies on his own experiences to assemble an image of working-class America. He writes that he has tried to remain as true as possible to reality and that, though many of the characters contained in his book are extremely flawed—addicted to drugs and violent—he loves them because they’re “just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way.”