Hillbilly Elegy

liberal, stood in stark cultural contrast to
my hillbilly Papaw. Mondale never had
a chance, and after he departed from the
political scene, Papaw never again
voted against his beloved “party of the
workingman.”
Jackson, Kentucky, would always
have my heart, but Middletown, Ohio,
had most of my time. In many ways, the
town where I was born was largely the
same as the one my grandparents had
migrated to four decades earlier. Its
population had changed little since the
1950s, when the flood of migrants on the
hillbilly highway slowed to a dribble.
My elementary school was built in the
1930s, before my grandparents left