By JD Vance the writer, we knew Hillbilly Élégie (Harper), his memoir published in 2016. In this initiatory story, the man who was at the time a young investor in Silicon Valley (employee of Peter Thiel) and archetype of the self-made man, recounted his childhood in Appalachia marked by social poverty, violence and addiction, as well as a kind of defeatist fatalism specific to the culture of Appalachia, where his grandmother “Mamaw” had pulled him at arm’s length to push him straight into the social elevator.
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