Carnegie Mellon University
March 04, 2016

“Barack Obama’s Literary Legacy” Highlights President’s Role as Writer

“Barack Obama’s Literary Legacy” “Barack Obama’s Literary Legacy”

Academics, journalists and pundits have long mined President Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” for information that would point to his political beliefs, but few analyses have approached the book as a literary work — until now.

In “Barack Obama’s Literary Legacy: Readings of ‘Dreams from My Father,’” Carnegie Mellon University’s Richard Purcell and co-editor Henry Veggian have collected a group of essays that highlight Obama’s literary influences and merits as a writer.

“The deft contributions to this collection, together with its rich introduction, demonstrate that Barack Obama’s ‘Dreams from My Father’ demands literary reading and attentiveness to a range of literary and cultural histories,” said Jay Garcia, associate professor of comparative literature at New York University.

Learn more about “Barack Obama’s Literary Legacy.”