Literary World Reacts To J.D. Vance as Trump’s Pick

Fresh off the weekend’s attempt on his life, former President Donald Trump announced that his Vice Presidential running mate would be ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ author JD Vance, whose divisive book describes his upbringing in rural Ohio. Vance made his debut VP candidate speech at last night’s Republican National Convention As you can imagine, the group formerly known as Literary Twitter (I cannot bring myself to call it “X”—sorry) has opinions on the choice.

HarperCollins seeing the JD Vance news pic.twitter.com/LITFYTua20

— Sophie Vershbow (@svershbow) July 15, 2024

Vance’s memoir, published in June 2016, is a New York Times bestseller, which Ron Howard and Netflix adapted for the screen in 2020. The book describes the author’s experience in rural America writ large, drawing conclusions about working class white voters, drug addiction and the struggling American economy. Critics say that Vance makes broad generalizations, reproduces myths about poverty, and ignores existing scholarship and study of Appalachia. Since the book’s and film’s releases, there has been a movement among writers and readers to highlight more accurate, first-person accounts of their experiences, in order to show a fuller picture of the places Vance describes.

With the Trump news, ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ is once again topping seller lists at the time of this writing. The VP announcement coincided with Amazon Prime Day, where Amazon offers discounted prices for a limited time, and Vance’s memoir topped the list of most-sold books followed closely behind an AI-generated summary of the memoir in case you don’t want to commit to the full thing. So many reviewers flocked to Goodreads to either show support for the book or drive down its ratings in protest that the website had to temporarily disallow reviews on Monday.

Given the confluence between Vance’s literary resume (or lack thereof, argue his haters) and the political buzz, writers, readers and publishing industry people have had a field day sharing their opinions on the news.

“right now a harpercollins marketing assistant who makes $42K a year is getting a microsoft teams call from their boss (who’s at their hamptons house), opening a new tab, and typing ‘we are delighted to announce,’” wrote @bartleby_era on X, referring to the memoir’s publisher.

Radical leftist publisher Seven Stories Press wrote, “Seven Stories Press is extremely thrilled to have never published JD Vance.”

“can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, 𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘺, pp. 179-181),” wrote @rickrudescalves.

The addition of Vance is a nice little bookish cherry on top of what already promises to be a chaotic election year. Stay tuned for proof that Trump ever actually reads his book.