If you read the book, you will find that Vance's family were originally from the Jackson, KY area and moved to Middletown OH in order to find work at the Armco Steel Mills. This was a pattern for thousands of families in the period and a huge number did this but maintained their close ties to the Appalachian region, travelling "home" on a regular basis. (The same was true of the Detroit and it's jobs in the auto industry). I can remember in the 70's when in Cincinnati for one reason or another that the I-75 bridges were choked southbound on Friday nights and north on Sundays by the weekend migrations. I was raised (lived most of my life) in the same region and was blown away by his book because it was the first factual and insightful discussion of the isolationist and family oriented social structure of the region which so dominates the psyche of the people who have lived there since the late 1700's. It is a subject that quite frankly is hard for outsiders to grasp. It has become worse with the drug problems over the last decades. Vance spent most of his summers there until his grandparents moved to Middletown (which is just north of Cincinnati). Middletown itself has a lot of the social culture of Appalachia since so many people migrated there. I have many family members who moved there and then returned to their home (including my mother and her relatives).
His book created an uproar in Kentucky due to the fact that there are several small colleges, writers workshops, literary journals etc that have grown up there fostered by cutting edge liberals, socialists, activists and agressive LBGTQ proponents. They seem to have a view themselves as the elite intellectuals of the area and believe they have drug the area into the 21st century. When the book was released there were instantly scathing reviews announcing that there was nothing relavent in the book and that it failed to show that the area had been elevated (by them) to a veritable state of nirvana. This is ludicrous and has been a stable problem for over 200 years. It was the main point the book studied and explained Vance's thoughts as a child and an adult as to the causes and the path he chose for himself to lift himself out of it. As someone who was born and lived there, in poverty, and used the only strength he had to rise above it, it rang as true in every regard and helped me understand the path I followed.
It is a book everyone who is interested in regional socialogical issues should read. One thing I would recommend is don't bother watching the movie. I have no idea what they were doing, but IMHO it bordered on artistic murder. It took a significant book and turned it into a boo-hoo soap opera. It never even got near the real story of the book and portrayed the characters in the book in a trivial illogical manner. It had no real relationship to the book or the significant story the book told. When I read the book and read some of the views, I realized that it was likely impossible for someone who had not lived there to understand it. Turns out that likely was the case of the people making the movie.
