Dreams from My Father

Obama's memoir, subtitled "A Story of Race and Inheritance," was published when he was thirty-three and beginning a run for the Illinois Senate. It traces his early life — Honolulu and Jakarta childhoods, a father in Kenya who was mostly an absence, his white mother and grandparents in Hawaii — through his years as a community organizer in Chicago and up to his entry into Harvard Law School in 1988, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama acknowledges in his introduction to using composite characters and adjusted timelines. Long out of print in its first edition, the book was reissued in 2004 with a new preface and became a bestseller.

Author: Barack Obama · Original publisher: Times Books (New York), 1995