Hillbilly Elegy

father, Lee Vance. Lee died just a few
months after Papaw’s birth, so Papaw’s
overwhelmed mother, Goldie, sent him
to live with her father, Pap Taulbee, a
strict man with a small timber business.
Though Goldie sent money occasionally,
she rarely visited her young son. Papaw
would live with Taulbee in Jackson,
Kentucky, for the first seventeen years of
his life.
Pap Taulbee had a tiny two-room
house just a few hundred yards from the
Blantons—Blaine and Hattie and their
eight children. Hattie felt sorry for the
young motherless boy and became a
surrogate mother to my grandfather. Jim
soon became an extra member of the