Memoirs are a great medium for learning the in-depth details and story that occurred throughout someones long and storied life. This is most certainly the case for the two memoirs written by J.D. Vance and Ta-Nehisi Coates. J.D. Vance wrote his memoir titled Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis regarding his life events in Jackson, Kentucky and Middletown, Ohio about how they molded him into the person he soon became. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his memoir titled Between the World and Me as a letter to his son to outline his life as an African American man growing up in the city of Baltimore, Maryland and becoming a man in New York City or as Ta-Nehisi Coates describes it as the Mecca. These two memoirs written by J.D. Vance and Ta-Nehisi Coates are remarkably similar and completely different in so many ways. Between the World and Me is about an African American man who struggles to shed his old ways after growing up in the inner cit
y of Baltimore, Maryland and Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis outlines the life of a poor and working class white man who overcame all odds to make a life for himself. Although these two memoirs seem to detail two vastly different backgrounds, they clash in a way that really unifies both marginalized classes in the United States today. According to the Democracy Journal, a writer named Rob Dreher said that the book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coatess book did for poor black people: give them a voice and presence in the public square. (Crabbe-Field) Taking a deep dive into both memoirs written by J.D. Vance and Ta-Nehisi Coates, they show the importance or lack thereof of religion, both of their difficult experiences as children in their respective early childhood communities, and exactly how their concept of the American Dream differs from one another.