Into the Toxic Waste Bin: On the Tension between Literature and Political Correctness

When JD Vance published his autobiographical “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016, no one, probably not even he, thought the 32-year-old would ever be a candidate for U.S. vice president.

At the time, the author had successfully produced something of a social report on the white working class in his home state of Ohio. A not inconsequential portion of Donald Trump’s voter base comes from the social group that Vance describes, often somewhat disparagingly, as “hillbillies.” The book says something about how Trump ascended to the U.S. presidency in that it shows those people in the American working class who gave their vote to, and, to this day continue to follow, the egocentric billionaire who has never given a thought to the social needs of workers. And not too long ago, Vance was anything but a Trump loyalist. He even vehemently criticized Trump until he had a change of heart. The Republican senator, who calls himself a post-liberal and who some described as a neo-reactionary politician, entered the political arena in 2022 and was elected senator from Ohio. Once humiliated by Trump, the former president named him as his running mate.

With “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance added to the innumerable variations of the American Dream, that rags-to-riches saga that says that everyone can make something of themselves if they just believe and work their way up with diligence and cleverness. From a literary perspective, the book is not outstanding. The “Elegy” — the term, in fact, refers to a poetically melancholic genre — is rather modest in terms of language and style. But it can at least teach us something. What is incomprehensible, though, is that Ullstein, the German publishing house that published “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2017, decided against reprinting it and forfeited its license for the book because the politician is now representing a “demagogic, exclusionary policy.”

The deciding factor should have been whether the book reflects Vance’s reactionary positions. Certainly, they align in many respects with the touches of social romanticism and the author’s presentation of himself as self-made. But it would be entirely ridiculous to describe “Hillbilly Elegy” as a discriminatory, inflammatory pamphlet. Vance will offer his opponents plenty of opportunities to get angry at him in the coming weeks of the campaign, such as when he recently referred the left wing of the Democratic Party as the “Hamas wing.”

Moreover, the publisher’s decision inaugurated a new chapter in the unending discussion about literature and political correctness — regardless of the fact that Vance quickly found another publishing house (Yes Publishing). There are plenty of examples of this debate, which have not diminished the literary quality of works like “Journey to the End of the Night” (“Voyage au bout de la nuit”), the 1932 novel by French antisemite and Nazi collaborator Louis-Ferdinand Céline, or the work of Austrian Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke. Handke drew criticism because of his pro-Serbian position during the Yugoslav wars and because he trivialized Serbian war crimes. He also gave a eulogy for Serbian despot Slobodan Milošević. Vance doesn’t even come close to those two great authors. But his example teaches us once again that one should carefully check whether there is a direct correlation between a book and its author’s political intentions and opinions before the book is relegated to literature’s toxic waste bin.