Dreams from My Father
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama, who was elected as U.S. President in 2008. The memoir explores the events of Obama's early years in Honolulu and Chicago up until his entry into law school in 1988. Obama published the memoir in July 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for 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".
Bill Ayers 2008 presidential election controversy
In 2008 and 2009 some conservative commentators advanced claims that Obama's autobiography, "Dreams from My Father" was written or ghost-written by Ayers. In a series of articles in American Thinker and WorldNetDaily, author Jack Cashill claimed that his own analysis of the book showed Ayers' writing style. In late October, US Congressman Chris Cannon and his brother-in-law attempted to hire an Oxford University professor, Peter Millican, to prove Ayers' authorship using computer analysis. Millican refused after they would not assure him in advance that his results would be published regardless of the outcome. Millican later criticized the claim, saying variously that he had "found no evidence for Cashill's ghostwriting hypothesis," that it was "unlikely" and that he felt "totally confident that it is false." In his 2009 unauthorized biography "Barack and Michelle," author Christopher Andersen repeated Cashill's claim. When asked about the claims in 2009 Ayers said, as an apparent joke, that he wrote the book at Michelle Obama's request, setting off renewed coverage of the claims on conservative blogs.