Reading List

Authors Like J.D. Vance

Hillbilly Elegy is set largely in Middletown, Ohio, where J.D. Vance’s mother’s family had moved from Breathitt County, Kentucky, after the Second World War. His mother struggled with drug addiction, and he and his sister were raised mainly by their grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2003, was deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a military journalist, then studied at Ohio State and Yale Law School. Harper published the memoir in June 2016, when he was 31; it reached number one on the New York Times list that August and was filmed by Ron Howard in 2020. It was also sharply criticised by writers and historians from Appalachia. The ten writers below share its ground: working-class families, the cost of leaving them, and the argument over who gets to tell their story.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Memoir · Class · Appalachia · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you want more books like Hillbilly Elegy, start with Jeannette Walls, whose The Glass Castle (2005) is another poor childhood with parents who could not cope, and Tara Westover, whose Educated (2018) is another escape from a hard family through education. Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland (2018) tells a working-class Kansas childhood and questions the generalisations Vance draws from his. Further down are two writers who answered his book directly, and a French sociologist who made the same journey out of a working-class home.

10 authors like J.D. Vance

01
The founding book on rural poverty

James Agee

American · Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), A Death in the Family (1957)

Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1909 and died in 1955. In 1936 Fortune sent him and the photographer Walker Evans to Alabama to report on sharecropper families; the magazine never ran the article, and the book that grew from it sold only about 600 copies before it was remaindered. His novel A Death in the Family, published after his death, won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize.

The ancestor of every book on this page: an outsider who lived alongside poor white Southern families and worried in print about his right to describe them. Vance writes from inside such a family; Agee shows how much harder it is to write from outside.

— Lisanne

Every book by James Agee →

02
Class, reported and argued

George Orwell

English · Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in British India in 1903 and died in 1950. For The Road to Wigan Pier he spent early 1936 in Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield. The first half describes miners’ housing, wages, diet and unemployment; the second is an essay on why many people who would gain from change resist it, and critics on the left called it snobbish.

The same shape as Hillbilly Elegy: close description of working-class lives followed by an argument about what holds people back. Orwell came from the middle class and looked in from outside; reading him beside Vance shows how much depends on who is describing whom.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Orwell →

03
Raised by a grandmother in Leeds

Richard Hoggart

English · The Uses of Literacy (1957), A Local Habitation (1988)

Hoggart was born in Leeds in 1918 and died in 2014. His father died when he was about one and his mother when he was eight, and he was raised by his grandmother in Hunslet, a working-class district of Leeds. The Uses of Literacy describes northern working-class family life, work and pleasures and how mass entertainment was changing them; A Local Habitation is the first volume of his autobiography.

Like Vance, Hoggart was raised by a grandmother and carried by education into another class, and he wrote about the home he left with affection and unease at once. Read him for the British version of the question: what does a clever child lose by getting out?

— Lisanne
04
The French return home

Didier Eribon

French · Returning to Reims (2009; in English 2013)

Eribon was born in Reims in 1953 and became a sociologist and the biographer of Michel Foucault. Returning to Reims (Retour à Reims) goes back to the working-class family he left, where his mother was a factory worker, and looks at both his class origins and the homophobia he faced. Édouard Louis cites it as a turning point for his own writing.

The closest European match to Hillbilly Elegy’s shape: a man who rose through education goes back to the family he left. Eribon treats his story as a case study in class, where Vance reads his mainly through culture; reading both shows what each lens leaves out.

— Lisanne
05
Glasgow, from the inside

Darren McGarvey

Scottish · Poverty Safari (2017), The Social Distance Between Us (2022)

McGarvey was born in 1984 and grew up in Pollok, on the south side of Glasgow; he first became known as the rapper Loki. Poverty Safari won the 2018 Orwell Prize for books. His later books include The Social Distance Between Us (2022) and Trauma Industrial Complex (2025).

Born the same year as Vance, McGarvey also writes about a poor neighbourhood as someone who grew up in it rather than as a visiting reporter. Read him for a Scottish account of the same questions: what poverty does to a family, and who gets to speak about it.

— Lisanne
06
A chaotic family, told plainly

Jeannette Walls

American · The Glass Castle (2005), Half Broke Horses (2009)

Walls spent part of her childhood in Welch, West Virginia, in a house without plumbing or heat, with a father who kept promising to build the family a glass castle. At 17 she left for New York, graduated from Barnard in 1984 and became a journalist. The Glass Castle spent more than 400 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

The closest match in feel: a poor childhood with parents who love their children and fail them, told without self-pity, and an escape through school and a city job. Walls stays with her own family and draws no lessons about a whole culture, which is the main difference from Vance.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jeannette Walls →

07
Education as the way out

Tara Westover

American · Educated (2018)

Westover was born in Clifton, Idaho, in 1986, the youngest of seven children of survivalist parents who kept her out of school. She entered Brigham Young University and went on to a doctorate in intellectual history at Cambridge in 2014. Her family, through their lawyer, has disputed parts of her account.

Like Vance, Westover owes her escape to the institutions her family distrusted, and both books end at elite universities. Educated is about one family’s beliefs rather than a region, and its break with home is sharper.

— Lisanne
08
A Kansas childhood, another reading

Sarah Smarsh

American · Heartland (2018), She Come By It Natural (2020)

Smarsh was born in Kingman, Kansas, in 1980 into a family of farmers and labourers. Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth was a finalist for the National Book Award. Writing in The Guardian, she questioned the generalisations about the white working class in Hillbilly Elegy.

Smarsh grew up rural, white and poor in the same years as Vance and reads her family’s story differently: as a question of class in America rather than of one culture’s habits. Read the two together for an argument conducted through memoir.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sarah Smarsh →

09
The historian’s answer

Elizabeth Catte

American · What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018), Pure America (2021)

Catte is a historian and a graduate of Middle Tennessee State University. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, published by Belt in 2018, responds directly to Hillbilly Elegy and places it in a long line of stereotypes about the region. Pure America followed in 2021.

The book on this list that argues with Vance most directly. Where he generalises from one family, Catte brings in the region’s history and its variety. Read her straight after Hillbilly Elegy.

— Lisanne
10
Appalachia as a novel

Barbara Kingsolver

American · The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Demon Copperhead (2022)

Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in Carlisle, Kentucky. Demon Copperhead, which retells Dickens’s David Copperfield in Lee County, Virginia, during the opioid crisis, shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and won the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has publicly criticised Hillbilly Elegy for blaming poor people for their own poverty.

Kingsolver covers much of Vance’s ground (addiction, a mother who cannot cope, a boy passed between carers) but as fiction, from inside the opioid epidemic. She writes against the idea that Appalachian poverty is mainly a cultural failing.

— Lisanne

Every book by Barbara Kingsolver →

Where to start if you loved J.D. Vance

If you liked Hillbilly Elegy, read Jeannette Walls.

The Glass Castle: a poor childhood with parents who love and fail, told without self-pity.

If you want the argument with it, read Elizabeth Catte.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia: a historian’s reply to the book.

If you want the same ground as a novel, read Barbara Kingsolver.

Demon Copperhead: a boy, an addicted mother and the opioid crisis in Lee County, Virginia.

If you want the European version, read Didier Eribon.

Returning to Reims: a sociologist goes back to the working-class family he left.

If you want more J.D. Vance, read his two books in order.

Hillbilly Elegy (2016), then Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (2026), about his conversion to Catholicism.

Frequently asked questions about authors like J.D. Vance

Who writes like J.D. Vance?

Jeannette Walls, Tara Westover and Sarah Smarsh are the closest matches. All three wrote memoirs of poor or working-class childhoods and of leaving home through education or work.

What should I read after Hillbilly Elegy?

Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle (2005), Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland (2018) and Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018), which responds to Vance’s book directly.

Does J.D. Vance have a new book?

Yes. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith was published by Harper on 16 June 2026. It is a memoir about his conversion to Catholicism.

Is Hillbilly Elegy a true story?

Yes. It is Vance’s memoir of growing up in Middletown, Ohio, raised mainly by his grandparents, whose family came from Breathitt County, Kentucky. Many Appalachian critics valued his account of his childhood but rejected its generalisations about the region.

Is there a film of Hillbilly Elegy?

Yes. Ron Howard directed the 2020 film, starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.

Which J.D. Vance book should I read first?

Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Communion (2026) continues his story, with faith at its centre.

Is J.D. Vance like Tara Westover?

In part. Both left hard families through education and ended at elite universities, Vance at Yale Law School and Westover at Cambridge. Westover writes about one family’s beliefs, while Vance draws wider conclusions about a culture.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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