Mr Vance was born into a far humbler environment in the steel town of Middletown, Ohio, raised in an unstable home by a ...

“Hillbilly Elegy” delves into Vance’s life, chronicling his challenging upbringing in a poor Rust Belt town and his journey ...

Before Vance became Trump’s enforcer, he was best known for his account of family life in the Rust Belt – which helps explain ...

J.D. Vance, 39, was only 31 when he published “Hillbilly Elegy ... white working-class Americans in a small Rust Belt town, where joblessness, poverty and violence were all par for the course.

Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir-cum-analysis of the Rust Belt’s decline, and a candid account of the poverty it had wrought, was a cult success which drew on his first-hand experience of violence ...