1 Filiation in Barack Obama’s, Dreams from My Father G. Thomas Couser Hofstra University Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father was written in the wake of his election in 1990 as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review: the publicity attendant on that event led to his being offered a contract for a book on contemporary race relations, which morphed in draft into a memoir subtitled A Story of Race and Inheritance. Although it was conceived, written, and published (in 1995) before his career in electoral politics got underway, Dreams owes its genesis to Obama’s historic election to one presidency; more than a decade later, it served ipso facto as a campaign autobiography during his historic candidacy for another, far more important presidency: it is thus a kind of proto-Presidential memoir. It interests me primarily, however, as an example of an emerging type of American life writing, which I call patriography: life writing about fathers by their sons or daughters. Like its companion subgenre, matriography, patriography is inherently relational and intersubjective life writing; it grows out of and attempts to represent an intimate human relationship. It is also, of course, intergenerational: it attempts to negotiate or understand a family legacy as passed on from father to son, an act I call filiation. Obama’s book takes its title, and its conception, from a father who was unavailable to him by virtue of early abandonment (when the son was only two) and geographical distance. This is an extreme example of a factor that typically stimulates patriography: the absence of the father. An even more extreme scenario shaped the life of his Democratic predecessor; Bill Clinton never met his biological father, who died before Bill was born. Nevertheless--or perhaps therefore--Clinton devoted the entire first chapter of his post-Presidential memoir, My Life, to