Memoir of a 21st-century history maker: why Barack Obama's book, published a decade ago but a best-seller only last fall, may be destined to become an American classic.

Editors' Note: Barack Obama will take his U.S. Senate seat in the 109th Congress this month. Obama, 43, will be the only African American senator sitting in this 21st-century federal lawmaking body. Furthermore, he's only the fifth African American ever to serve as a U.S. senator.

Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, was published in 1995. As a result of publicity in 1990 when he became the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review, he was asked to write a memoir by Times Books, a division of Random House. The book received what Obama, a Democrat elected last November from Illinois, says were "mildly favorable" reviews and "under-whelming" sales and was first published in paperback in 1996 by Kodansha Globe. After the civil rights attorney, Illinois state senator and law school lecturer won his adopted home state's Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, Dreams From My Father was re-released in paperback by Three Rivers Press (another Random House imprint), with a new preface by the author. It arrived in bookstores shortly after his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention last summer made him a political star. (For a review of the book, see Black Issues Book Review, November-December 2004.)

Dreams From My Father tells the story of Obama's early life, especially his complex racial heritage and upbringing. He was born in Hawaii, the son of white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, who met as students at the University of Hawaii. For a time as a child, he lived in Indonesia with his mother and her second husband. But for the most part, Obama was raised by his mother and her parents in the intricate ethnic broth that is Hawaii.

Dreams From My Father is also the story of the long shadow Obama's natural father cast over his life, despite years of absence. Obama himself marveled that his mother's parents did not object to her interracial marriage. His father had to leave his wife and baby son in Hawaii when he went to study for his Ph.D. at Harvard on a scholarship, and he later returned to his homeland without them. The senior Obama became a government economist and remained in Kenya until his death in an automobile accident when his son was 21. Obama writes that much of what he knew of his father was revealed in admiring stories told by his mother and grandparents or gleaned from one extended holiday visit from his father when he was 10. After his father's death, Obama visited his Kenyan homeland to explore his legacy. Obama writes eloquently about his origins, ethnicity and the identity; and his election to the Senate is expected to fuel new interest in his book. Obama's work is reminiscent of the slim narrative by Frederick Douglass that was published in 1845. Obama's memoir lives up to scholar William Andrews's description of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself, as "the most compelling and sophisticated renditions of African American selfhood seen in literature."

Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times has followed Obama's political career for several years. Black Issues Book Review asked her to examine the role of the memoir in his Senate campaign and to share her impressions of this remarkable man.

In 2000, Barack Obama strolled into the conference room at the Chicago Sun-Times with an entourage and an armload of books. He was appearing for an endorsement interview in his race to unseat the longtime U.S. Congressman Bobby L. Rush (D., Ill.). After the interview, Obama autographed and distributed copies of Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance to editorial board members. We politely took the books and returned to our offices. I threw the first-edition copy on a bookshelf to gather dust with other unsolicited manuscripts. Obama went on to lose overwhelmingly to Rush.

Four years later, Obama would emerge as "the great black hope" of the Democratic Party. When Senator John Kerry, the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, heard Obama speak at a rally in downstate Illinois, he invited the state senator to speak at the Democratic National Convention. The slot for the coveted keynote speech is usually reserved for established political figures, and little did Obama know that his appearance would catapult him onto the national stage, an object of a media obsession.

Indeed, because of Obama's sudden rise to virtual rock-star status, his memoir, which was written years before he entered national politics, has found an unusual place among memoirs.

Just about every serious candidate for high office since John F. Kennedy has written a memoir. Obama, however, may be the first candidate whose political campaign sparked interest in his memoir, rather than the other way around. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage (HarperCollins, 2003), was originally his Harvard senior thesis that his father, former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, shrewdly arranged to have edited and published while his son was a senator from Massachusetts. And John Kerry's A Call to Service, My Vision for a Better America (Viking Books, 2003), John Edwards's Four Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2003), George W. Bush's A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House (William Morrow & Company, 1999), and Bill Clinton's Between Hope and History: Meeting America's Challenges for the 21st Century (Random House 1996) were clearly written as campaign tools. In contrast, Obama's memoir is a highly textured and personal look at his life not his mission, but definitely the heart and mind behind it.

The Making of an Image

Bruce I. Newman, professor of marketing at DePaul University and editor of the Journal of Political Marketing, published by the Haworth Press in New York, said Obama's memoir "never would have sold had he not become popular.

"We have moved into an era where candidates must consider, how do you manufacture an image of yourself?. How do you manufacture an image that is saleable, is attractive, is meaningful and has substance to the American people?" Newman said.

"Part of that image-manufacturing process revolves around a candidate writing memoirs;' he added. "I think it is a by-product that the campaign is selling the book."

Newman, the author of several books on political marketing, said that after Obama's electrifying speech at the DNC, the Illinois state senator became a national leader. "Suddenly, now people are beginning to look and search to see what is behind the image," Newman said. "The book now is being sought out to figure out who this man really is, where is he from and what does he care about.

"It becomes so much more powerful for a man like Obama," he said. "When Obama wrote the book, I don't think there was really any thought in his mind that he would reach this level of fame so quickly. Now his so-called marketing process has taken on a life of its own."

The Not-So-instant Best-seller

After his DNC appearance, Obama's memoir rocketed to a respectable spot on The New York Times paperback best-sellers list. In August, the Associated Press reported that a first-edition copy of Obama's memoir was going for $255 on eBay and pre-release orders of the republished version had put it on best-seller lists. [See BIBR's FLYING OFF THE SHELVES, page 72.]

But Obama had not planned to be a best-selling author. "I started writing it right after law school in 1991," Obama told me during a recent interview. "I took about four months off to get it started. Then I started organizing Project Vote to help register voters for the 1992 election and didn't work on it consistently until the end of 1992. I worked in the evenings after I got home from my law practice for about two-and-a-half years."

Obama, who graduated from Columbia University with a degree in political science and a specialty in international relations, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law. He worked as a civil rights lawyer and more recently as a senior lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. He has been married to his wife, Michelle, for 14 years, and he met her when he was a summer associate at the Chicago firm where she worked. They have two daughters, ages 5 and 3, and Michelle is now a public affairs director at the University of Chicago hospital.

I didn't pick up Obama's book again until 2003, when I was handed another copy at a sparsely attended informal press conference his campaign pulled together to introduce black journalists to the would-be U.S. senator. I was surprised by two things: the memoir was extremely well written, and two, it lacked the self-consciousness one would expect from a politician.

After steamrolling through the field of challengers in the primary, Obama had the luxury of watching his Republican challenger, Jack Ryan, implode over a sexual scandal and withdraw. In his race against Alan Keyes, the GOP's replacement candidate, the former presidential candidate who was brought in from Maryland because of his "star quality," Obama scored a lopsided victory over Keyes, taking more than 70 percent of the vote. During his own race, Obama was also traveling to battleground states to energize the Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign with his newly discovered "star quality" and successfully raise money for other Democratic candidates.

Coming of Age in Two Americas

Obama's memoir is an interior look at the boy who grew into a man in two Americas. One of the criticisms he faced during his unsuccessful congressional bid against incumbent Bobby Rush in 2000 was steeped in the color and class consciousness that still exists in some parts of the black community. In subtle attacks, the biracial Obama was depicted as "not being black enough" and being too Ivy League.

"I don't think anybody reading this book would get the impression that I make myself out to be heroic;' Obama said. "I try to be honest about my mistakes, and doubts and fears and immaturity as a young person. I think it was very important from my perspective for me to reveal that sort of the process of me growing up.

"I think that now when a lot of young men, African American men in particular, look at me, there is this perception that somehow I arrived on the scene--that I've gone to Harvard and I teach law and this and that and the other" he said.

"What I wanted to do was to show I really wasn't that different than a whole bunch of African American boys and young men out here who are struggling with an absent father and uncertainty about their identity and trying to figure out what it means to be a man, making mistakes and having to adjust:' Obama said. "I wanted them to see that process so that hopefully they can feel even if they make mistakes, they can overcome them and go on to achieve."

After Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention, reporters criticized him for fictionalizing events and using composites to flesh out characters he cites in his memoir. Obama says the basis for his memoir were journals he kept through college and through the start of law school.

In the Preface, Obama discloses that the "'dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed" and that some of the characters that appear are "composites" but he emphatically denies that any of the characters in his book are fiction. "I wrote my preface with an abundance of caution" he said to BIBR.

As BIBR went to press, The Washington Post trumpeted that Obama had signed with the high-powered Washington superagent Robert Bennett (who sold both Hillary and Bill Clinton's megaselling biographies) and speculated that we'd shortly hear about a new six-figure book deal. "I'm certain I'll be writing another book," Obama had told BIBR previously. "The next book will probably be more policy oriented. This was very much written as a personal story. I think the next book will probably reflect more of my beliefs about where the country is heading."

Mary Mitchell is an editorial board member and columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. She also hosts a weekly public affairs program on a Chicago radio station.