The Ohio Steel Town That Shaped J.D. Vance’s Life and Politics

Middletown, Ohio, a small city of tree-lined streets surrounding a sprawling steel mill, seems as far from the towering skyscrapers of New York as it gets.

But on Monday, they were suddenly linked: Donald Trump, a real estate heir, tapped Middletown’s most famous son, J.D. Vance, as his running mate.

Millions of people first learned of Middletown from “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s best-selling memoir and the Hollywood movie that followed.

Mr. Vance, 39, wrote about his chaotic upbringing there, raised in the intermittent care of a single mother struggling with addiction. In his depiction, Middletown was “little more than a relic of American industrial glory,” a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope.”

His bleak portrait of the city just north of Cincinnati, was initially held up as reference guide for urbanites on the coasts desperate to understand Mr. Trump’s appeal among the struggling white-working class.

Mr. Vance’s explanation was a stark one: some of Middletown’s woes were caused by the damaging decisions of government and big business, but the deeper problems lay in the fatalism, indolence and victim mentality of the city’s white working class.