Hillbilly Elegy

the margin, “This is a vomit of sentences
masquerading as a paragraph. Fix.” I
heard through the grapevine that this
professor thought Yale should accept
only students from places like Harvard,
Yale, Stanford, and Princeton: “It’s not
our job to do remedial education, and
too many of these other kids need it.”
That committed me to changing his mind.
By the end of the semester, he called my
writing “excellent” and admitted that he
might have been wrong about state
schools. As the first year drew to a
close, I felt triumphant—my professors
and I got along well, I had earned solid
grades, and I had a dream job for the
summer—working for the chief counsel