Hillbilly Elegy is a 2016 memoir by JD Vance that explores his family's Appalachian heritage and the socioeconomic struggles of his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, later adapted into a 2020 film directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams. The book recounts Vance's turbulent upbringing, marked by his grandparents' alcoholism and his mother's drug addiction, while crediting his strict grandmother for pushing him toward success at Ohio State University and Yale Law School. Vance argues that "hillbilly culture" fosters social disintegration and economic insecurity, using personal anecdotes—like witnessing welfare recipients with cell phones—to explain the region's political shift from Democratic to Republican. The memoir became a bestseller after a July 2016 interview in The American Conservative, and received praise for its compassionate analysis of the white underclass, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz later calling it a touching story that moved him to tears. Vance's subsequent political rise—becoming a US Senator from Ohio in 2023 and Vice President of the United States in 2025—has kept the book's themes at the center of national discourse.