Hillbilly Elegy

of genuine pride.
Despite that pride, he had no interest
in my working there: “Your generation
will make its living with their minds, not
their hands,” he once told me. The only
acceptable career at Armco was as an
engineer, not as a laborer in the weld
shop. A lot of other Middletown parents
and grandparents must have felt
similarly: To them, the American Dream
required forward momentum. Manual
labor was honorable work, but it was
their generation’s work—we had to do
something different. To move up was to
move on. That required going to college.
And yet there was no sense that
failing to achieve higher education