Barack Obama

Obama wrote Dreams from My Father in 1995, after being elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review and long before any national office, and it is a memoir about an absent Kenyan father, a white mother from Kansas, and the work of assembling one identity out of Hawaii, Indonesia and the South Side of Chicago. It sold modestly, then enormously after 2004. He served two terms as president from 2009. The later books, The Audacity of Hope and A Promised Land, are political rather than personal; the first one is the book other writers keep pointing at.