In 1990, Barack Obama became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. A year later, he was approached by a literary agent, who asked if he would be interested in writing an autobiography about his life.
Obama said yes, and in 1995, his book Dreams from My Father was published. As the title suggests, it focused mainly on the relationship he had with his father, Barack Obama Sr. When articles about the book started coming out, they referred to his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, as simply "a white anthropologist from Kansas."
But the characterizations of Obama's mother — first as "a white anthropologist from Kansas" and then as "a single mother on food stamps" and "the woman who died of cancer while fighting with her insurance company at the end of her life" — don't encompass who she was, the unconventional life she led or the influence she had on the future president of the United States, says writer Janny Scott.
Scott's biography of Obama's mother, A Singular Woman, traces Dunham's life and the relationship she had with her son, whose rise in the political world came largely after her death in 1995. But he has said he largely thanks his mother for the values that led him to the work he now does.
"He credits her with impressing upon him the importance upon one's duty to others — perhaps that the best thing that one can do is to give opportunities for others," Scott tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And her work in many ways foreshadows his. There was a period in 1979 where she was working in what her boss described to me as 'community development in Java.' That's five years before he becomes a community development person in Chicago."
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