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".
Madelyn Dunham
Madelyn and Stanley Dunham raised their grandson Barack Obama from age 10 while his mother and step-father were living in Jakarta, Indonesia, so he could go to school in Hawaii. In fifth grade, Obama was enrolled at the Punahou School, a prestigious preparatory school where his tuition fees were paid with the aid of scholarships. Ann Dunham later came back to Hawaii to pursue graduate studies, but when she returned to Indonesia in 1977 for her master's fieldwork, Obama stayed in the United States with his grandparents. Obama wrote in his memoir "Dreams From My Father": "I'd arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they'd leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight".