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the author shows up at the bookstore just before seven in the evening. He is a lanky young fellow, with shirtsleeves rolled up and no tie. The store’s two owners greet him with the usual congratulations. One of them has in fact read the book all the way through. The other has not: He found it too long, especially all that stuff about the author’s time as a community organizer in Chicago.

Their store, Eso Won Books, is the leading African-American book vendor in Los Angeles. The owners serve wine and cheese when famous writers such as Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley come by to read. Tonight they hand Barack Obama a glass of water and bring him to the back of the bookstore, where his audience awaits him. All nine of them. None of his former classmates from Occidental College have shown up. He is getting used to this. The reading at his neighborhood bookstore in Chicago—57th Street Books, a Hyde Park co-operative of which he was a member—drew at most thirty, including only one colleague from the University of Chicago, where he teaches constitutional law. The tiny gathering at his book-signing party in Chicago consisted largely of folks whom the hostess, Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s friend and one of the Chicago mayor’s top advisers, had personally begged to drop by. Here at Eso Won, Obama smiles modestly at the nine strangers and, wholly unaccustomed at this stage of his 34-year-old life to adoring crowds, says, “Why don’t we sit in a little circle?”

To the largely white crowd at the Hyde Park bookstore, Obama read a passage from his memoir, Dreams from My Father, about the white grandparents who had raised him; here, he reads aloud about his father, a Kenyan, whom he barely knew. He reads in a sonorous voice but does not indulge himself, instead closing the book after just a few paragraphs. He then talks for several minutes about his unusual upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia before offering to take questions. A woman raises her hand.

Obama says to her, “Tell me your name and what you do.”

The woman thinks to herself: Jesus, who does this guy think he is?

There are lots of questions—about community empowerment, about civil rights, about writing—and Obama’s answers are expansive. He seems enthused, even humbled, by their interest. Harold Patton, a former stage manager for Ray Charles, hands Obama his scrapbook, which says authors i have known on the front. Obama adds his signature to the ranks of James Baldwin, Alex Haley, and Alice Walker.

Before heading back to Chicago, Obama does the only TV appearance of his modest book tour, a thirty-minute cable-access show in L.A. called Connie Martinson Talks Books. He sits in a chair in front of a copy of his book while Martinson pronounces his memoir “wonderful.” But she is at least as impressed with her guest’s articulate, engaging personality. At the conclusion of the interview, she leans over to the young man in the sport coat and slightly askew tie.

“You know, I’ve never said this to anyone,” she tells Obama, “but you would have a terrific career in politics.”

Obama thanks her for the compliment, not letting on that he’s been thinking the same thing himself. Five weeks later, he stands in a hotel conference room in Hyde Park, and before a crowd of 200—a gathering far greater than any he has seen on the promotional circuit—he announces his candidacy for the Illinois State Senate.

*****

the author in barack obama never really left the room.

In the years since his ’04 Democratic-convention keynote speech opened Obama’s biography to mass consumption, we’ve picked through nearly every theme—the biraciality, the absent father, the community organizing, the deft navigation of the political minefield that is Chicago—as a way of explaining What Makes Obama Obama. Yet the president’s writing life has gotten surprisingly little notice. His talent with words is widely acknowledged, but that skill is often regarded as more instrumental than essential, a kind of handy tool for a politician, like George W. Bush’s facility for remembering names or Bill Clinton’s talent for spewing out worldly minutiae. But what if the knack is more like a calling? At least from early adulthood if not before, Barack Obama was clearly driven to write; to trace that continuing compulsion, from the days when he penned fiction and then memoir to his present speechcraft, is to recognize that writing is anything but a small part of Obama’s life. It’s basic to who he is.

“I think he sees the world through a writer’s eye,” says senior White House adviser and former Chicago journalist David Axelrod. “I’ve always appreciated about him his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it. I mean, I remember when we were meeting clandestinely with the guys who were vetting the vice presidential candidates. There was this courtly southern gentleman who was doing the vetting. The president said to me, ‘This whole scene’s right out of a Grisham novel.’

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