Hillbilly Elegy

Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted
to write him a letter and tell him that he
had described my home perfectly. That it
resonated so personally is odd,
however, because he wasn’t writing
about the hillbilly transplants from
Appalachia—he was writing about
black people in the inner cities. The
same was true of Charles Murray’s
seminal Losing Ground, another book
about black folks that could have been
written about hillbillies—which
addressed the way our government
encouraged social decay through the
welfare state.
Though insightful, neither of these
books fully answered the questions that