Dreams from My Father

Book by Barack Obama

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama that explores the events of his early years in Honolulu and Chicago until his entry into Harvard Law School in 1988. Obama originally published his memoir in 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for the Illinois Senate. The book, frequently praised for its literary qualities, has also been criticized for inaccuracies and over use of artistic license. Obama acknowledges using composite characterizations and adjusted timelines in the book's introduction, writing that the "hazards" of autobiography could not be fully avoided.

Barack Obama recounts how his parents met and his own life until his enrollment at Harvard Law School in 1988. His parents were Barack Obama Sr. of Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas, who had met while they were students at the University of Hawaii. In the first chapter, speaking of his father and namesake, Obama states "[h]e had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old." 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.

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 Obama achieved greater national prominence in 2007, Dreams found renewed critical attention. Speaking in 2008, 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, 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 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." Writing for the Guardian, literary critic Robert McCrum wrote that Obama had "executed an affecting personal memoir with grace and style, narrating an enthralling story with honesty, elegance and wit, as well as an instinctive gift for storytelling." McCrum had included the book in his list of the 100 best non fiction books of all time. In 2011, Time magazine listed the book on its top 100 non fiction books written in English since 1923. 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.

Obama acknowledges using composite characterizations and adjusted chronology in the book's introduction, writing that the "hazards" of autobiography could not be fully avoided. Noting the book's considerable number of alterations from reality, invented composite characters, and restructured timelines, scholar David Garrow described Dreams as "a work of historical fiction" in his 2017 biography of Obama, Rising Star. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, a former girlfriend of Obama's, has objected being combined with another woman into a white character, as she is half Asian and considers herself mixed race, like Obama. A number of factual inaccuracies or exaggerations in Dreams were also discussed by David Maraniss in his 2012 work Barack Obama: The Story; Maraniss describes the book as more akin to fictional literature than true autobiography.

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 name Referred 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 (composite)Frederick Greg OrmeScott Johnnie OwensJohnnie Mike RamosJeff Sohale SiddiqiSadik