Dreams from My Father


Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a memoir by Barack Obama, that explores the events of his early years in Honolulu and Chicago up until his entry into law school in 1988. Obama originally published his memoir in 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for the Illinois Senate. He had been elected as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. According to The New York Times, Obama modeled Dreams from My Father on Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man.
After Obama won the U.S. Senate Democratic primary victory in Illinois in 2004, the book was re-published that year. He gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and won the Illinois Senate seat in the fall. Obama launched his presidential campaign three years later. The 2004 edition includes a new preface by Obama and his DNC keynote address.

Narrative

recounts his life up to his enrollment at Harvard Law School in 1988. He was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama Sr. of Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas, who had met while they were students at the University of Hawaii. Obama's parents separated in 1963 and divorced in 1964, when he was two years old. The elder Obama later went to Harvard to pursue his PhD in economics. After that, he returned to Kenya to fulfill the promise to his nation. Obama himself formed an image of his absent father from stories told by his mother and maternal grandparents. He saw his father one more time, in 1971, when Obama Sr. came to Hawaii for a month's visit. The elder Obama, who had remarried, died in a car accident in Kenya in 1982.
After her divorce, Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese surveyor from Indonesia who was a graduate student in Hawaii. The family moved to Jakarta when Obama was six years old. At age ten, Obama returned to Hawaii under the care of his maternal grandparents for the better educational opportunities available there. He was enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School, a private college-preparatory school, where he was one of six black students. Obama attended Punahou from the 5th grade until his graduation in 1979. Obama writes: "For my grandparents, my admission into Punahou Academy heralded the start of something grand, an elevation in the family status that they took great pains to let everyone know." There, he met Ray, who was two years older and also multi-racial. He introduced Obama to the African-American community.
Upon graduating from high school, Obama moved to the contiguous United States for studies at Occidental College. He describes having lived a "party" lifestyle of drug and alcohol use. After two years at Occidental, Obama transferred to Columbia College at Columbia University, where he majored in Political Science. After graduation, Obama worked for a year in business. He moved to Chicago, where he worked for a non-profit as a community organizer in the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the city's mostly black South Side. Obama recounts the difficulty of the experience, as his program faced resistance from entrenched community leaders and apathy on the part of the established bureaucracy. During this period, Obama first visited Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, which became the center of his religious life. Before attending Harvard, Obama decided to visit relatives in Kenya for the first time in his life. He recounts part of this experience in the final and emotional part of the book. Obama acknowledged his entire memoir to reflect on his personal experiences with race relations in the United States.

Book cover

Pictured in left-hand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama Sr.. Pictured in right-hand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham.

Persons in the book

With the exception of family members and a handful of public figures, Barack Obama says in the 2004 preface that he had changed names of others to protect their privacy. He also created composite characters to expedite the narrative flow. Some of his acquaintances have recognized themselves and acknowledged their names. Various researchers have suggested the names of other figures in the book:
Actual nameReferred to in the book as
Salim Al NurridinRafiq
Margaret BagbyMona
Hasan ChandooHasan
Earl ChewMarcus
Frank Marshall DavisFrank
Joella EdwardsCoretta
Pal EldredgeMr. Eldredge
Mabel HeftyMiss Hefty
Loretta Augustine HerronAngela
Emil JonesOld Ward Boss
Keith KakugawaRay
Jerry KellmanMarty Kaufman
Yvonne LloydShirley
Ronald Loui / Terrence Loui Frederick
Greg OrmeScott
Johnnie OwensJohnnie
Mike RamosJeff
Sohale SiddiqiSadik
Wally WhaleySmitty

Reception

In discussing Dreams from My Father, Toni Morrison, a Nobel Laureate novelist, has called Obama "a writer in my high esteem" and the book "quite extraordinary." She praised
his ability to reflect on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had, some familiar and some not, and to really meditate on that the way he does, and to set up scenes in narrative structure, dialogue, conversation—all of these things that you don't often see, obviously, in the routine political memoir biography. ... It's unique. It's his. There are no other ones like that.

In an interview for The Daily Beast, the author Philip Roth said he had read Dreams from My Father "with great interests," and commented that he had found it "well done and very persuasive and memorable."
The book "may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician," wrote Time columnist Joe Klein. In 2008, The Guardian's Rob Woodard wrote that Dreams from My Father "is easily the most honest, daring, and ambitious volume put out by a major US politician in the last 50 years." Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times, described it as "the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president."
The audiobook edition earned Obama the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2006. Five days before being sworn in as President in 2009, Obama secured a $500,000 advance for an abridged version of Dreams from My Father for middle-school-aged children.

''Time Magazine'' Top 100 List

In 2011, Time Magazine listed the book on its top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923.

Versions

; Translations