Usha Vance’s expansive reading list gives a glimpse of a private figure in the campaign
As Republican vice presidential nominee Vance campaigns across the country, his wife, Usha Vance, has been a near-constant presence by his side. In the final weeks of the campaign, she has traveled with her own regular companion: a copy of “The Iliad.”
Her edition of the Greek epic — a celebrated 800-page translation from 2023 by University of Pennsylvania classicist Emily Wilson — has accompanied Vance across the country, briefly visible as she has boarded and exited campaign planes in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado and California.
“That’s because our now 7-year-old decided in the spring that he was obsessed with mythology,” Vance said in a rare phone interview. “He picked up a child’s version of ‘The Odyssey’ and then ‘The Iliad’ and all these other things and became completely obsessed. So to keep up with him, I decided it was time to pick ‘The Iliad’ up myself.”
The volume is just one piece of a larger, growing library of books she has torn through in three months on the campaign trail, the dust covers visible to reporters on airport tarmacs around the country.
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