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How his ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ catapulted J.D. Vance to become Trump’s vice-president pick
- Vance’s bestselling memoir about his roots in the rural US South made him a celebrity just as Trump was sweeping to the presidency in 2016
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At the heart of J.D. Vance’s swift journey from venture capitalist to US vice-presidential candidate is a memoir he first thought of in graduate school, Hillbilly Elegy.
Vance’s bestseller about his roots in rural Kentucky and blue-collar Ohio made him a national celebrity soon after its publication in the summer of 2016, and became a cultural talking point after Donald Trump’s stunning victory that November.
The Ohio Republican has since been elected to the US Senate and, as of Monday, chosen as Trump’s running mate in the former president’s quest for a return to the White House. He is 39, and would be the youngest vice-president since Richard Nixon, who served two terms under Dwight Eisenhower, starting in 1953.
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In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance reflects on the transformation of Appalachia from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican, sharing stories about his chaotic family life and about communities that had declined and seemed to lose hope.
Vance first thought of the book while studying at Yale Law School, and completed it in his early 30s, when it was eventually published by HarperCollins.
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“I was very bugged by this question of why there weren’t more kids like me at places like Yale … why isn’t there more upwards mobility in the United States?” Vance said in 2016.
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