Born on the Fourth of July versus Hillbilly Elegy

On American dis- versus re-member-ing veterancy

In 2020, I published “Forgotten Taiwanese Veteran’s Memory of Compulsory Service” in Journal of Veteran Studies. An outlier out of over a dozen scholarly monographs on Asian Diaspora and East-West cultural studies, I wonder if it is about time to return to this personal quest quite separate and apart from my decades-long professional engagement with textual and cultural analysis. The hesitancy is evident even in the title of the 2020 piece flirting uneasily with the oxymorons of “forgotten . . . memory” and “compulsory service”: the past recollected by force of will from the individual, despite subconscious and collective erasure; any service is ideally undertaken at one’s own discretion rather than compelled to do so. Both contradictions — memory and service, memory of service, serviceable memory, disservice of/to memory — pivot on the concept of “force” or “will.” I will myself to revisit and to write these words like a rite to right Taiwanese and American misperceptions of veterancy-cum-vagrancy, knowing full well my righting it may come across as patently wrong to a sizeable portion of the Taiwanese and American populations.

In the context of Taiwan, since every “able-bodied” male is obligated to serve in the military before or after college, it is a part of growing up that merits no additional mention, no different from such de rigueur tasks as taking entrance exams or, say, learning to do calligraphy, which seems utterly pointless in the age of computer and laptop. Why practice military exercises, like rehearsing ink brush strokes, some may contend, when one needs neither in peace time and in keyboard typing? Given the PLA’s large-scale, live-fire military drills around Taiwan, most recently in “Justice Mission 2025” in December 29–30 that year, the tightening noose would cause the island to gasp for air in the months to come. Before then, regurgitating Taiwanese veterancy still appears tasteless. In the island nation, veteran associations are nominal organizations, except the institution of Honored Veterans Hospitals (榮民醫院Rongmin Yiyuan). For the record, these renowned hospitals are neither for veterans exclusively like VA Hospitals in the US nor are veterans particularly privileged since practically every adult male patient may well be a veteran, not to mention male doctors, nurses, custodians, and visitors. Veterancy in the Taiwanese society is so taken for granted that it is well-nigh irrelevant to public discourse, a vagrant variant unmoored from one’s life experiences and from collective unconscious.

By contrast to Taiwan’s near total obliviousness, veterancy dangles between supreme usefulness and utter uselessness in the US. In the American context, veterancy-cum-vagrancy has been a recurring motif since the Vietnam War. Veterans’ broken bodies and minds crystallize in Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), a title that readily honors veterans who have lapsed into paralysis, depression, homelessness, and addiction, if not exploding into PTSD-related violence. The homecoming from the battlefield treads along a road to perdition in the worst-case scenario. Such bleak association with vagrancy is counterpointed by recent rapid ascent of politicians who are veterans, a service to the country that burnishes their patriotic credentials appealing to Republican, Democratic, and independent constituents. Veterancy-cum-vagrancy is overcompensated by veterancy-cum-victory. Politicians flaunting a true or overblown record of military service capitalize on transcending the stereotype of grunts-turned-veteran-trash, reminiscent of phoenixes soaring out of the ashes of war and the sores of memory.

Put simply, politicians who served transcend; grunts-turned-veterans stay trashed. Whereas the latter group signals dis-member-ment from the society because of its detritus, used-up status, the former reinstitutes veterans’ social “membership,” in effect repurposing and re-member-ing veterancy because of its political use-value. An American duality or duplicity: dis-membered nonbeings versus re-membered superbeings. To dis-member is to cut off and sever the undesirable; to re-member is to coronate and satisfy the collective heart’s desire. The two are, however, symbiotic: trash from which one transcends; transcendence reeking of trash — “white trash,” to borrow from J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016, 3). Veteran memoirs and novels, often followed by Hollywood adaptations, testify to their co-dependency of rise and fall, symptomatic of the American public’s yearning for hero worship and deliverance, for eclectic “better angels” in denial of demons within. Angels exist only in contradistinction to demons; Vance at the White House only in contradistinction to Kovic at the doghouse. Don’t take my word for it. Here is Vance from his memoir’s introduction: “those of us lucky to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us” (2). It is the other way around, though: Vance chases up those demons, trampling on them to rise up in the MAGA movement.

A comparative study of Taiwanese and American veterans scrutinizes the shared binary representations: the trash and the treasure. In terms of trash-vagrancy, Taiwan’s laobing (老兵old soldier[s] for veteran[s]) manifests an uncanny cross-cultural kinship with America’s PTSD-plagued and disabled veterans, tragically embodied by Vietnam War vet Kovic’s paraplegia from the chest down in Born on the Fourth of July. In terms of treasure-victory, Taiwan’s no-one contrasts starkly with America’s veteran-politician supremacy, culminating in the Iraq War vet and Trumpian attack dog Vance berating the “ungrateful” Zelensky at the White House on February 28, 2025. Hardly a one-off performance, Vance’s controversial “memoir” has been dubbed “Hillbilly Reprimand” by T. R. C. Hutton (33 italics in the original), and as a “Jeremiad to the white working class” by Dwight B. Billings (39). Public humiliation of Zelensky dovetails nicely with his, in Billings’ choice words, “Trumpalachia” “Blame Game.” Vance’s Jeremiad is not so much a lamentational elegy for his people of the Appalachian hills as a self-eulogy, a Song of Myself up by the bootstraps, with the faint subliminal association of military boots he wore in Iraq. Should Ukraine be accused of being a nation of ingrates, then Vance sticks out as a disgrace, a sell-out from “Appalachia and the Rust Belt . . . sister geographies” (Elizabeth Catte 61). I shall return to the “faintness” of Vance’s military days after Kovic.

Void of heroic vets or combat-tested heroes, Taiwan’s lack serves as an inverse cranium grail to silhouette the US’s overflowing fullness, of a self-congratulating, self-conning nature. Whereas the bottom dogs in Taiwan and the US look alike, the top dogs reign only in the USA and exemplify American “exceptionalism.” As I have dealt with literary sightings of Taiwan’s laobing in “Refugees with Guns, Laobing with Phallus: Ghost of Taiwan circa 1949” in China Pop! (2024), I turn now to the American dis- versus re-member-ing veterancy, specifically, to the binary oppositions of Kovic and Vance, and the Oliver Stone and Ron Howard Hollywood remakes.

Born on the Fourth of July

While the title of Born on the Fourth of July (1976) taps into Ron Kovic’s accident of birth on Independence Day, it suggests the patriotic, gung-ho background of Kovic’s all-American childhood and adolescence, fixated on baseball and war heroes. Indeed, John Wayne’s The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) inspires Kovic to join the Marine Corps right after high school (69). On the heels of the grandiose title, the memoir opens with repeated nightmarish assaults on sensibility. Kovic shocks with traumatic experiences of battlefield injury and the VA hospitalization, so much so that a dark, sinister reading of the title emerges. Heroic pose notwithstanding, part of Kovic — to be clinically precise, from the mid-chest down — died and the hero wannabe was literally castrated because of his nationalist fervor. Rather than independence and freedom, Kovic becomes dependent on a wheelchair and many other medical interventions. Kovic was wounded in his second tour in Vietnam, which he had apparently opted to undertake after having survived the first. From a war hero to a disabled veteran protesting against war, Kovic’s anti-war stance does not waver from the Vietnam War to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, evidenced from Kovic’s “Introduction 2005,” a new foreword of sorts: “The war on terror has become a war of terror” (25, italics in the original). Bush’s justification of invasion on grounds of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction is as flimsy and deceptive as Nixon’s rallying cry for the Vietnam War, namely, to stop the spread of communism. Both terrorism and communism are alive and well today, despite Nixon’s and Bush’s waging of war.

Conceivably, the abrupt wounding in Kovic’s opening chapter could have made a martyr out of him, but he survives, barely, hence disrupting any script of heroism. For instance, Norse Mythology’s Valkyries collect slain warriors from battles for an afterlife of mead-drinking and merry-making. Half-dead and healing soldiers wind up in the purgatory or perhaps hell of VA hospitals. Kovic’s abjection and shame of paralysis at the VA hospital belies any such heroic wishful thinking. By compelling the reader to enter his body as it fails to evacuate itself, Kovic shows how an adult body has been reversed to diaper days pre-potty-training. Kovic takes us along in the enema procedure for the wheelchair-bound: “It is the Six o’Clock Special. There are maybe twenty guys waiting by now. It looks like a long train, a long assembly line of broken, twisted bodies waiting for deliverance” (50). An ironic use of spiritual and religious deliverance, Kovic forces us to face the fact that paraplegics require assistance to defecate and urinate. The procedure by “Tommy the enema man” going about his business with “a cigarette dangling from the corner of the mouth” closes with the analogy that “It’s like a car wash” (49–50, 52). Kovic does not stint the details for the reader, despite sparing his visiting family: “I do not tell them [Kovic’s family] what I do every morning with the plastic glove, or about the catheter and the tube in my penis” (53).

Shielding his family from the ugly truth via self-repression coexists with repeated baring, sharing with the reader. Outed in public is private shame. Seemingly contradictory, the repression-expression or suppression-sharing mirrors his split self. His thinking head and moving arms are pitted against the rest of his body: “living in this angry numb corpse . . . strain the yellow urine into the ugly rubber bag . . . dig into his rear end to clean the brown chunks of shit out” (176). A corpse that is numb is unlikely to feel angry or any emotion at all. It is the consciousness shackled to the corpse that rages against his own body. The use of “his rear end” circles back to Kovic’s split narrative between the first-person “I” and the third-person “He” throughout. Rather than a literary conceit, the “He” removed from the authorial voice is agonizingly literal, representing two-thirds of his body. Chapters — even within the same chapter — thus shuttle between the twin narrative voices of an “I” versus a “He.”

This split narrative voice stems from Kovic’s split self. The reader almost wishes for the two voices to cohere once Kovic finds his cause in “the spring of 1970” in terms of anti-war demonstrations (147). But the book does not wrap up so facilely, relentlessly reprising not only the third-person voice but also an ominous undercurrent of “the corporal from Georgia and the ambush in the village and the dead children on the ground” (163). Separately and repeatedly, these two inexplicably horrifying visions have already intruded into the narrative. Joined together toward the very end, they finally reveal themselves to be the ghosts gnawing at Kovic’s conscience. The repetition compulsion over the course of the book culminates in the revelation that, in the fog of war, Kovic accidentally shot and killed a corporal from Georgia. On the other hand, the My Lai-type massacre was perpetrated when Kovic’s unit strafed indiscriminately against a Vietnamese village suspected of harboring Vietcong. It turns out those in hiding were all women and children, yet another carnage of innocent Vietnamese that lent the bad name of “baby killers” to Vietnam vets.

The split in Kovic’s book extends to the fissure between the book and Oliver Stone’s film adaptation. Purportedly, Born on paper and Born onscreen narrate the same story, but they diverge in ways that estrange anyone who expects a rerun. At the height of his cinematic career, Stone made changes to the plot that endeared Hollywood audience. Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) has visited the Vietnam War by internalizing the conflict within the American psyche, namely, splitting soldiery into the “bad” Sergeant (Tom Berenger) and the “good” Sergeant (Willem Dafoe). Both actors make cameo appearances in Born (1989), as though the latter film continues the life of the former, fighting the Vietnam War still. Berenger plays the Marine Corps recruiter in smart uniform, whom the young Kovic idolizes; DaFoe plays a fellow disabled veteran drowning his pain in a prolonged, make-believe “sex” tourism in Mexico.

Indulging in excesses brings about a sense of guilt and subsequent correction. Thus, a falling out with Dafoe brings Kovic back to Georgia’s rural countryside, paying tribute at the fallen corporal’s grave, confessing to the victim’s family of his friendly fire that killed the corporal, a scene nonexistent in Kovic. Kovic’s Catholic confession and the bereft mother’s forgiveness, however, is not accompanied by confessions to dozens of families of nameless Vietnamese victims of the massacre. Stone settles for repentance within the American context alone, after highlighting family value of Kovic’s large Catholic family. Kovic’s confession leads to his protests against Nixon’s re-election campaign and the ensuing arrest. Stone deploys the documentary style that characterizes his docudrama JFK (1991) by cross-cutting between footages of Nixon’s acceptance speech and Kovic and other disabled veterans’ demonstration outside the venue. Beaten and savaged, veterans stage a comeback en masse, symbolizing the doves trumping the hawks.

The mayhem recycles images of his battlefield injury and being carried back to safety by an African American, with helicopter noise blasting above. America is at war with itself, which Stone massages for a happy ending as Tom Cruise’s Kovic gushes about feeling like “home” when he is about to go on stage at the Democratic National Convention in 1976, which, of course, launched Jimmy Carter to presidency. This Hollywood closure bookends the film, in keeping with the Hollywood opening. Whereas Kovic opens with the trauma and the unending dehumanization of a paraplegic, Stone opts for young romance as Cruise serenades and kisses his high school sweetheart Donna at the prom to the instrumental music of John Williams’s “Moon River” (Figure 1). Far from sweating uncouthly, Cruise’s cheek shows traces of raindrops, as he dashes through the downpour to catch Donna’s last dance. From romance to Vietnam, Stone closes the dance with a fade-out and then a fade-in to the marine patrol about to be ambushed. Raindrops or sweat, this is the moment Cruise in wheelchair tries in vain to recreate with Donna at her university, aborted because Donna busies herself organizing an anti-war demonstration.

Figure 1: Cruise’s Kovic kisses Donna at the prom in ‘Born on the Fourth of July.’

Hillbilly Elegy

The self-splitting that plagues Kovic is put to good use by Vance, who compartmentalizes his hillbilly legacy into the good and the bad white working class, reminiscent of Stone’s good versus bad Sergeants. The good half of the white working class Vance inherits; the bad half Vance scorns. Hillbilly Elegy announces Vance’s allegiance early on: “I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree . . . [for whom] poverty is the family tradition . . . Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash” (3). The exclusion of others is breath-taking: why only Scots-Irish and why only white? So much so that the identification reads like a hypocritical sleight of hand, concealing his resentment against his own background. After all, Vance concludes that “the best way up for the hillbilly was out” (29). Nonetheless, he does have his hillbilly folks to thank when Yale Law School’s need-based scholarship offered him “nearly a full ride.” As though in self-mockery, Vance quips, “it was the first time being so broke paid so well” (199). Such witticism masks institutional and governmental support with conservative sentiment of individual meritocracy. As Vance confesses elsewhere that his “self-image was bitterness masquerading as arrogance” (231), the turn of phrase over rich-poor flips the inferiority complex into the superiority complex. Yet this arrogance lapses into schoolyard bullying when Vance lambasts the Ukrainian head of state, which the world witnesses as an illustration of American intimidation at the behest of Vladimir the Invader, the Impaler.

A certain amount of self-loathing drives his resentment against “nonworking poor,” crystallized in his addictive, irresponsible mother, deadbeat biological father, and a long string of stepfathers or boyfriends. He blames the lack of self-agency and hard work in the proverbial “Welfare Queens” and deadbeat dads like his own father and the numerous men in his mother’s life (140). By contrast, he champions “working poor” exemplified by his hillbilly Mamaw and Papaw (Hillbilly parlance for grandparents): “My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful” (148). Note that class is the only determinant in Vance’s conservative world view, with no intersectionality with race, gender, or any other factors.

Vance’s meteoric rise from the humble background can be, indubitably, attributed to his memoir at the tender age of thirty-four, written before this “investor” at a “venture capital firm” ever set foot in politics (Author’s note on the back cover). The genuine, unvarnished narrative voice on his life and family serves to silhouette the patriotic credential of military service, prominently flaunted in the second line, on the heels of his birthplace, in the back cover’s “Author Note”: “He enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school and served in Iraq.” The memoir follows the same sequence, with the very first reference to his service occurring belatedly, in effect halfway through the book, after multiple chapters on his Kentucky and Ohio origin: “Years later, our marine boot camp marksmanship instructors” would find Vance a rare exception because his Papaw [maternal grandfather] had taught him “excellent fundamentals” (107). The raw iron and coal from the hillbilly country appears to be melded and forged into a patriot-politician by the Marine Corps and Iraq. Likewise, the White House website introduces Vance thusly: “JD served his country honorably by enlisting in the United States Marine Corps” in the third paragraph after two on his hillbilly background.

“Excellent fundamentals” come in more ways than mere marksmanship. Trump’s choice of Vance has targeted well the seventy-seven million voters who felt aggrieved, left out by Democratic liberal policies in response to millennial globalization and rising tide of equality and justice. To a significant portion of the US population, the Obama-Biden project is deemed an erosion of white privilege, a birthright of sorts denied whites, eliciting white ressentiment and revanchism. “Make America Great Again!” secretes Trump’s dog whistle to make it white again. Apologies for the dog metaphor, but it has been borne out by January 6 riot incited by the master demagogue, the ring master of the MAGA circus. That the “p-ssy” grabbing, convicted felon can return to the White House bespeaks how the white majority identifies with the xenophobic and narcissistic charlatan, feeling alienated by liberal politics. On the Republican Party’s ticket in 2024, Vance’s military service pulls the wool — military camouflage? — over the public eye regarding the draft-dodging president on account of an alleged bone spur. Shouldn’t the draft-age Trump’s bone spur worsen in his old age and raise a red flag in the most recent physical checkup of the oldest president in US history? Vance’s early destitution with the fate of “Mountain Dew Mouth” of bad teeth awaiting the adult complements Trump born with a silver spoon in his mouth (19).

Vance’s controversial memoir has elicited pushbacks in the collection entitled Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (2019). But the collection arrays regional, Appalachian critiques, rarely touching on the military aspect of Vance’s memoir. The co-editors’ “Introduction” states that Vance “joins the Marines upon [high school] graduation to get his life in order” (Harkins and McCarroll 5). They also claim that “Hillbilly Elegy has been used as a shorthand way to explain the Trump phenomenon” (13). If so, the Marine Corps comes as a shorthand way to explain the Vance phenomenon. Dwight Billings dubs Vance “the spokesman for the white working class, the hillbilly guru, the Trump whisperer” (42). Lisa R. Pruitt asks rhetorically: “How has Vance parlayed three short decades of life into a small fortune and a career as America’s ‘favorite white trash-splainer”? (106) Such monikers as “spokesman,” “whisperer,” and “white trash-splainer” aptly resort to the figure of speech of the mouth. Getting his life “in order” involves perfecting his talent of public speaking as a Marine Corps public relations representative in Iraq, which intensifies in his postwar, post-Yale confidence in applying for a judicial clerkship: “all I needed was an interview and I’d get the job” (219). The causal relationship bears out Vance’s faith in his power of speech, which the world has duly observed.

Out of a 269-page memoir, only the latter part in Chapter 10, approximately 20 pages in total, are devoted to the Marine Corps boot camp, which is interrupted by a return to attend Mamaw’s funeral, and deployment to Iraq as a “public affairs marine,” “the media relations officer” (172, 175). With his military experience occupying a paltry seven per cent of his memoir, Ron Howard’s film adaptation decides to minimize it even further, centering instead on the grandmother-mother, good-bad hillbilly conflicts. The promotional shot in Figure 2 features Glenn Close and Amy Adams only, without the childhood or adult Vance. Howard’s promotional shot or “sales pitch” stems from his directorial decision to downplay the protagonist’s Marine Corps career in favor of his family crisis while he was at Yale.

Figure 2: Close and Adams in Ron Howard’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’

Hardly a grunt on the front line, Vance relies on his silver tongue to climb up. Long a part of the legal and political establishment, he continues to pose as an anti-elite. In the memoir’s “Conclusion,” Vance writes that “As a cultural migrant from one group to the other . . . I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn — recently, an acquaintance used the word ‘confabulate’ in a sentence, and I just wanted to scream” (252–253). Hasn’t Vance screamed enough in the strident Hillbilly Elegy? Isn’t Vance also confabulating himself, schmoozing and flirting with the powers that be, namely, the rising populism, when he tailors a solicitation to Trump in his memoir’s “Afterword,” penned two years after the memoir’s publication: “Despite all my reservations about Donald Trump (I ended up voting third party), there were parts of his [Trump’s] candidacy that really spoke to me . . . his disdain for the ‘elites’” (262). As if telling it like it is, Vance professes his early qualms with Trump. Joining forces in spite of such differences portray a ticket truthful to their belief. Despite this gesture of “reservations,” Vance was willing to do Trump’s bidding to Zelensky, one of many presidential directives. Hillbilly upbringing has served Vance well in his White House blowup, albeit a discredit to any legal training, diplomatic etiquette, and political craftsmanship, Yale or elsewhere, under his “Tiger Mother” mentor Amy Chua or others. To confabulate in psychology suggests replacing fact with fantasy, which is the trajectory of Vance’s storied life, selectively privileging his beloved, belligerent Mamaw to the exclusion of other hillbillies and institutional programs, confabulating and fabricating with/as the con man all the way to the White House.

One final fissure stretches beyond the American psyche. Taiwan’s military police where I served is often scoffed as “toy soldiers,” good to look at with the crisp bright green uniform ironed nightly after duty, white epaulets, and shiny black boots, but how different is that image from Vance the suave “media relations officer,” who probably never had to soil his uniform and boots in combat? While the titular “versus” sets up the appearance of a case with two opposing sides in a court of law, Kovic and Vance chart a bipolar America swinging between the traumatic and the triumphal, the trashed and the treasured. Just as the division of Kovic and Vance falls within One America, a Taiwanese veteran’s fading military memory reflects the American Dis- versus Re-member-ing of veterancy. Chickens talking to ducks, as the Taiwanese saying goes, one ex-toy soldier thus engages in conversation with a paralyzed comrade stuck in a wheelchair and another red, hot air balloon flying beyond the reach of non-Yalie Po’ Folks like you and me. Who knows, some miracle may yet jump species across cultures!

Works Cited

Billings, Dwight B. “Once Upon a Time in ‘Trumpalachia’: Hillbilly Elegy, Personal Choice, and the Blame Game.” Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. Edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019, pp. 38–59.

Born on the Fourth of July. Directed by Oliver Stone, performances by Tom Cruise, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Universal Pictures, 1989.

Catte, Elizabeth. “Stereotypes on the Syllabus: Exploring Hillbilly Elegy’s Use as an Instructional Text at Colleges and Universities.” Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. Edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019, pp. 60–79.

Harkins, Anthony, and Meredith McCarroll. “Introduction: Why This Book?” Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. Edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019, pp. 1–15.

Hillbilly Elegy. Directed by Ron Howard, performances by Glenn Close, Amy Adams, Netflix, 2020.

Hutton, T. R. C. “Hillbilly Elitism.” Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. Edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019, pp. 21–33.

Kovic, Ron. Born on the Fourth of July. Akashic, 1976.

Ma, Sheng-mei. China Pop! Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups. The Ohio State University Press, 2024. https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215760.html

Ma, Sheng-mei. “Forgotten Taiwanese Veteran’s Memory of Compulsory Service.” Journal of Veteran Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 2020, pp. 23–29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21061/jvs.v6i3.210 or

https://journal-veterans-studies.org/articles/10.21061/jvs.v6i3.210/ or https://journal-veterans-studies.org/14/volume/6/issue/3/.

Pruitt, Lisa R. “What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals about Race in Twenty-first-century America.” Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. Edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019, pp. 105–133.

Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. HarperCollins, 2016.