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American Lit: Lit Circles: Hillbilly Elegy

Lit Circles 2016-17

Review

"You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist

Author: J. D. Vance

Setting: Middletown, OH

Title

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

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on 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."