JD Vance was the first real writer to appear on a winning presidential ticket since Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Each embodied the fashions of his age. Wilson owed his cerebral reputation to dry academic essays in the Political Science Quarterly. Vance, meanwhile, is the master of the preferred medium of American millennials — the “personal essay”. His raw material is “lived experience”; his method is “autoethnography”. His life, even his inner life, is elevated to the status of data. Hillbilly Elegy, a personal essay in book form, was a phenomenon. It propelled its author to within a heartbeat of the presidency. Personal essays, it seems, have always been Vance’s bread and butter. Even at Yale Law School, he was busy writing personal essays instead of studying law. The first draft for what bec