Hillbilly Elegy

residents migrated out of the state. Some
areas saw even greater emigration:
Harlan County, for example, which was
brought to fame in an Academy Award–
winning documentary about coal strikes,
lost 30 percent of its population to
migration. In 1960, of Ohio’s ten million
residents, one million were born in
Kentucky, West Virginia, or Tennessee.
This doesn’t count the large number of
migrants from elsewhere in the southern
Appalachian Mountains; nor does it
include the children or grandchildren of
migrants who were hill people to the
core. There were undoubtedly many of
these children and grandchildren, as
hillbillies tended to have much higher