"Hillbilly Elegy" rockets to top of bestseller list after JD Vance picked as Trump's VP

JD Vance published his bestselling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" in 2016, just months before former President Donald Trump won his first presidential campaign. Now, with Trump announcing Vance as his running mate on Monday, the book is back in the news — and at the top of the bestseller lists. 

Trump's decision to pick Vance out of a crowd of vice presidential hopefuls has also boosted viewership of the film adaptation of "Hillbilly Elegy," with streams of the Ron Howard-directed 2020 movie surging 1,180% on July 15, according to research firm Luminate. 

As of Wednesday morning, the film was ranked as the fourth-most streamed show on Netflix. Viewers watched the film for a combined 19.2 million minutes on Monday, the day Vance was picked as Trump's running mate, compared with 1.5 million minutes on the prior day, Luminate said.

"Hillbilly Elegy"  also tops Amazon's Kindle bestseller list, surging from No. 220 prior to Trump's announcement. Sales of the book now total at least 1.6 million copies, according to Circana, which tracks around 85% of hardcover and paperback sales. 

Vance's book, which details his roots in rural Kentucky and blue-collar Ohio, was an immediate hit and made him a national celebrity. The memoir became a cultural talking point after Trump's presidential victory in 2016, with some readers seeking insights from the book about Trump's appeal to rural voters. 

In "Hillbilly Elegy," the Ohio senator reflects on the transformation of Appalachia from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican, sharing stories about his chaotic family life and about communities that had declined and seemed to lose hope. Vance first thought of the book while studying at Yale Law School, and completed it in his early 30s, when it was eventually published by HarperCollins.

"I think that it's more about the White working-class folks who aren't necessarily economically destitute but in some ways feel very culturally isolated and very pessimistic about the future," Vance said on NPR's "Fresh Air" program in 2016 in an interview about "Hillbilly Elegy." 

He added, "That's one of the biggest predictors of whether someone will support Donald Trump — it may be the biggest predictor — is the belief that America is headed in the wrong direction, the belief that your kids are not going to have a better life than you did."

Vance, 39, would be the youngest vice president since Richard Nixon, who served two terms under Dwight Eisenhower, starting in 1953.

—With reporting by the Associated Press.

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Aimee Picchi

Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.

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