Barack Obama’s Literary Influences

Listed here you will find Barack Obama’s literary influences. Below are all the books and authors that contributed to the shaping of Obama.

Obama is a devourer of books, and that means that he has gleaned insights from thousands of books over his lifetime. As a young man in Chicago, Obama characteristically spent many hours in an almost empty apartment with volumes of philosophy and literature.

A taste for serious fiction is rare in the American male these days, but Obama has it. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch television instead of reading some novels he had given her.

Barack Obama has learned, by his political practice, to empathize with the lives of whites and non-whites, males and females, and his reading of literary fiction and philosophy have given him an unusually subtle and nuanced imaginative range.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin)

Turning to the book that Barack Obama has most recently cited as a major influence to him, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” it is not the Lincoln of popular American myth — the secular saint and martyr — we find praised there. It’s Lincoln the wily politician, who was not above carefully hedging his public positions and who prided himself on cajoling his opponents to his side.

Reinhold Niebuhr. Moral Man and Immoral Society.

Niebuhr’s compelling idea was that there is serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.

Malcolm X

According to “Dreams From My Father,” among the many characters in African-American literature, the one that the adolescent Barack Obama felt closest to was Malcolm X, whose discipline and “repeated acts of self-creation” impressed him. Yet, when Malcolm X wrote of the desire to “expunge” the white blood in his veins, the young Obama “was left to wonder what else I would be severing if and when I left my mother and my grandparents on some uncharted border.”

Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals - Saul Alinsky

If you haven’t read “Rules for Radicals,” it’s not what you might expect. Written with a vigour and a panache that convey Alinsky’s legendary charisma, it is less a primer than a really concise, witty and iconoclastic manifesto crossed with a war manual. Alinsky wrote it to try to correct the many errors of the generation of activists produced by the 1960s, which he regarded as being too dogmatic, too self-righteous, too romantic, too idealistic, too infatuated with exotic ideas and too impatient.

The New York Times asked Obama to provide a list of books and writers that were significant to him.

Parting the Waters (Taylor Branch)

Herman Melville

E. L. Doctorow (perhaps Obama’s favorite)

Ernest Hemmingway

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance

Thomas Jefferson

Mark Twain

James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son

W. E. B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward

John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle

Robert Caro’s Power Broker

Studs Terkel’s Working

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments,

Robert Penn’s All the King’s Men

Friedrich Nietzsche

Paul Tillich

Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Gandhi: An Autobiography

Shakespeare's King Lear

To Find Out More Go To: The Books That Barack Obama Reads