JD Vance signs a copy of his book Hillbilly Elegy during a campaign event in Ohio last month. Photo / Getty Images
JD Vance signs a copy of his book Hillbilly Elegy during a campaign event in Ohio last month. Photo / Getty Images
Shortly after Donald Trump announced JD Vance as his running mate on July 15, Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy shot up Amazon’s bestseller list. It has remained there for roughly two weeks – evidence that, even as Vance has stumbled in his debut as a vice-presidential candidate, joining the tickethas delivered a huge boost to his book sales.
Vance’s memoir, first published in 2016, has sold more than 750,000 copies in all formats since he was named Trump’s vice-presidential pick, according to his publisher Harper, a HarperCollins imprint. Harper is printing hundreds of thousands of copies to keep up with demand.
Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy was first published in 2016. Photo / Getty Images
In paperback alone, Hillbilly Elegy sold some 200,000 copies in the week ending July 20 and was the No 1 bestselling print book across all genres, according to Circana Bookscan. The previous week, its print sales totalled 1500 copies. Sales for the e-book and the audiobook, narrated by Vance, have also surged.
Vance’s book, subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, was a hit before he entered politics. Since its release, Hillbilly Elegy has sold some 3 million copies and was adapted into a movie by Ron Howard.
It memoir chronicles Vance’s path from a rough childhood growing up in Middletown, Ohio, to his success as a graduate of Yale Law School and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. After Trump’s unexpected political rise, Vance’s book was embraced by some pundits and reviewers as a kind of cultural-political Rosetta Stone that helped illuminate how and why Trump drew in white working-class voters.
The memoir also attracted its share of critics, including those who said he had misrepresented the lives and culture of the disadvantaged white Americans he claimed to represent. It even inspired a book-length anthology, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, which aimed to be a corrective of sorts to the stereotypes about the region and people that were pervasive in Vance’s book.
