Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy [Paperback]

2020 American Book Award winner, Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award
2019 Weatherford Award winner, nonfiction

With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance’sHillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisishas defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What aboutHillbilly Elegyaccounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future?

Appalachian Reckoningis a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadowHillbilly Elegyhas cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyondHillbilly Elegyto allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected inAppalachian Reckoningprovide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay,Appalachian Reckoningmakes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.

Anthony Harkins is a professor of history at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he teaches courses in popular culture and twentieth-century United States history and American studies. He is the author ofHillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon.

Meredith McCarroll is the director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College, where she teaches courses in writing, American literature, and film. She is the author lc.