The #1 New York Times Bestseller Is Now A Major-motion Picture Directed By Ron Howard And Starring Amy Adams, Glenn Close, And Gabriel Basso"You will not read a more important book about America this year. "-The Economist "A riveting book. "-The Wall Street Journal"Essential reading. "-David Brooks, New York TimesHillbilly 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. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D. 's grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility.