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".
Letter to My Daughter
"Letter to My Daughter" is Maya Angelou's third book of essays. She had published several volumes of poetry, including "Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie" (1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She had recited her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. In 2009, when "Letter" was published, Angelou had published six out of her seven installments of her series of autobiographies. Her sixth autobiography, "A Song Flung Up to Heaven" (2002), was considered her final autobiography until she published her seventh autobiography, "Mom & Me & Mom", in 2013, at the age of 85.