J.D. Vance's grandparents 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 their grandchild would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. However, Vance's family struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of poverty.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and colorful figures, HILLBILLY ELEGY is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.