[1] Vance spent the entirety of his career at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he both completed his doctoral work and taught as the Kenan Professor of Sociology until his retirement in 1969.
Despite this physical impediment, Vance was precocious, learning from his mother to read at the age of four and later developing a broad set of intellectual interests that encompassed art and poetry as well as social science and history.
[2] Some accounts of Vance's life attribute his mental acuity and determination to his early experience with the physical setbacks from polio.
Vance conducted influential demographic research on the American South that sought to explain the region's racial problems and economic underdevelopment.
[2] Vance married Rheba Usher, a student at the University of North Carolina, in 1930 with whom he later had three sons, David, Donald, and Victor.