“If Obama is elected, he’ll be one of the most literary presidents in recent memory” says Laura Miller in her piece, “Barack by the Books“, at Salon.com. Miller takes a “look at some of the formative books in his intellectual and political life to see if we can learn more about the man behind the movement.”
“Obama the reader blossomed as an undergraduate at Occidental College in California and, especially, during the two monkish years he spent finishing up his degree at Columbia University in New York. “I had tons of books,” he told his biographer, David Mendell (“Obama: From Promise to Power”), about this time in his life. “I read everything. I think that was the period when I grew as much as I have ever grown intellectually. But it was a very internal growth.” Even after he left New York to work as a community organizer in Chicago, Mendell reports, Obama lived so much like a retiring writer — spending many hours holed up in a spartan apartment with volumes of “philosophy and literature” — that some of his colleagues assumed he was gathering material for a novel.”
Obama’s reading list included:
Herman Melville
Toni Morrison
E.L. Doctorow -“cited as his favorite before he switched to Shakespeare”
Philip Roth
Nietzsche
Reinhold Niebuhr
Ralph Ellison
Malcolm X
and the legendary community activist Saul Alinsky
Related Book Patrol posts:
The Role of the Book in the Ascent of Barak Obama
Books Hit the Campaign Trail
What Barack is Reading
The Biblio Campaign Trail: The New Road to the White House
What’s Your Candidate Reading?
What the Candidates Should Be Reading
The Presidential Book Debate
Which Book Would You Bring to the White House?