Need help with Chapter 1 in J. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy? Check out our revolutionary side-by-side summary and analysis. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis J.D. Vance, 2016 HarperCollins 272 pp. ISBN-13: 546 Summary From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class.
1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Hillbilly Elegy
Hillbilly Elegy sets out to explore the struggles of the rural white working class in 21st-century America through the personal story of its author, JD Vance. Part autobiography, part sociological text, and part political manifesto, the book tells a story of dysfunctional families; substance abuse; the material, spiritual, and moral decline of Appalachia; and the struggles to achieve true economic and social mobility in the United States. Ultimately, JD overcomes the odds and achieves a life of success and respectability outside of the hillbilly culture from which he came—but at a heavy personal cost, and with many struggles along the way.
A Troubled Home Life
JD was born in 1987 in Middletown, Ohio, to a family of transplanted Kentucky hillbillies. His mother, Bev, would struggle with substance abuse issues for most of his childhood and adolescence, inflicting severe emotional trauma on him and his older sister, Lindsay. On one occasion, she pulled over the car while she was driving him and threatened to severely beat him—until he escaped to a nearby house and had her arrested. On another occasion, her drug addiction spiraled so far out of control that she forced her teenage son to provide a clean urine sample so she could pass a drug test.
She also cycled through five marriages during this period of JD’s life, sometimes with men she’d only known for a few weeks. The instability was a major source of pain for him as he was growing up—he never had a true father figure and had a conflicted-at-best relationship with his biological dad. Bev would often force him to move in with her new men, taking him to new towns away from his friends and family, only for these people to be suddenly and unceremoniously removed from his life with their relationship with Bev ended.
Saved By His Grandparents
JD’s maternal grandparents—Mamaw and Papaw, as he called them—saved JD from falling into the same dysfunctional pattern of life as his mother and so many other people in his community. They taught him that he was capable of anything if he worked hard enough and to never buy into the idea that the deck was stacked against him just because of the circumstances into which he’d been born.
Hillbilly Elegy Jd Vance Sparknotes Pdf
JD recalls his Papaw staying up late with him to help him master advanced math concepts. Later in life, when he permanently moved out of his mother’s house as a teenager, his Mamaw (then a widow) provided him the safety, security, stability, and unconditional love that had been so sorely lacking from his biological parents. She made sure he did his homework, kept his room clean, and gave him the structure and the drive for success that would ultimately spur him on to bigger and better things. In one memorable story, his Mamaw saved up and purchased him an expensive, state-of-the-art graphing calculator, just so he could succeed in his advanced placement math class.
Hillbilly Elegy Jd Vance Sparknotes Summary
This personal investment in his future showed JD that there were people who loved him and would be willing to help him realize his potential. As JD himself puts it, his grandparents were “the best thing that ever happened to him.”
Hillbilly Elegy Jd Vance Sparknotes Book
Achieving Upward Mobility
Hillbilly Elegy Jd Vance Sparknotes Chapter
JD enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduating from high school. Enduring the emotional and physical toll of basic training taught him the virtues of self-reliance and showed him that he was capable of achieving far more than he had given himself credit for. He discovered that he had spent his whole life underestimating himself—thanks to his tumultuous upbringing in which he felt unloved and unwanted, and the hillbilly culture, which encouraged a deep pessimism and fatalism about one’s prospects in life.
After being discharged, JD went on to Ohio State and then to Yale Law School, where he discovered just how different his hillbilly upbringing had been from those of the upper-middle-class and wealthy people he was now surrounded with. At Yale, JD discovered the value of social capital—the networks of relationships that enable individuals to function and succeed. Having social capital meant access to people, institutions, and opportunities. JD realized how sorely lacking he’d been in this vital asset for all his life. But...