Name	Philip Roth
Imagesize	150x172
Birthname	Philip Milton Roth
Birthdate	March 19, 1933
Birthplace	Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist
Genre	Literary fiction
Period	1959–present
Nationality	American
Influences	Henry James, Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Milan Kundera, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Bernard Malamud, Nikolai Gogol, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Primo Levi, John Updike, Albert Camus
Influenced	Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933)

Influences and themes

Much of Roth's fiction revolves around semi-autobiographical themes, while self-consciously and playfully addressing the perils of establishing connections between the author Philip Roth and his fictional lives and voices, including narrators and protagonists such as David Kepesh and Nathan Zuckerman or even the character "Philip Roth", of which there are two in Operation Shylock. In Roth's fiction, the question of authorship is intertwined with the theme of the idealistic, secular Jewish-American son who attempts to distance himself from Jewish customs and traditions, and from what he perceives as the at times suffocating influence of parents, rabbis, and other community leaders. Jewish sons such as most infamously Alexander Portnoy and later Nathan Zuckerman rebel by denouncing Judaism, while at the same time remaining attached to a sense of Jewish identity. Roth's fiction has been described by critics as pervaded by "a kind of alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it". a reviewer criticized it as infused with a sense of self-loathing. In response, Roth, in his 1963 essay "Writing About Jews" (collected in Reading Myself and Others), maintained that he wanted to explore the conflict between the call to Jewish solidarity and his desire to be free to question the values and morals of middle-class Jewish Americans uncertain of their identities in an era of cultural assimilation and upward social mobility:

The cry "Watch out for the goyim!" at times seems more the expression of an unconscious wish than of a warning: Oh that they were out there, so that we could be together here! A rumor of persecution, a taste of exile, might even bring with it the old world of feelings and habits — something to replace the new world of social accessibility and moral indifference, the world which tempts all our promiscuous instincts, and where one cannot always figure out what a Jew is that a Christian is not.

Awards and honors

Two of Roth's works of fiction have won the National Book Award; two others were finalists. Two have won National Book Critics Circle awards; again, another two were finalists. He has also won three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral. In 2001, The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy. His 2004 novel The Plot Against America won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005 as well as the Society of American Historians’ James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction. Roth was also awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, an award Roth has received twice. He was honored in his hometown in October 2005 when then-mayor Sharpe James presided over the unveiling of a street sign in Roth's name on the corner of Summit and Keer Avenues where Roth lived for much of his childhood, a setting prominent in The Plot Against America. A plaque on the house where the Roths lived was also unveiled. In May 2006, he was given the PEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007 he was awarded the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, making him the award's only three-time winner. In April 2007, he was chosen as the recipient of the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

The May 21, 2006 issue of The New York Times Book Review announced the results of a letter that was sent to what the publication described as "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.'" Six of Roth's novels were in the 22 selected: American Pastoral, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. The accompanying essay, written by critic A.O. Scott, stated, "If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction of the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won."

Films

Four of Philip Roth's novels and short stories have been made into films: Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy's Complaint; The Human Stain; and The Dying Animal which was made into the movie Elegy.

Bibliography

Zuckerman novels

The Ghost Writer (1979)

Zuckerman Unbound (1981)

The Anatomy Lesson (1983)

The Prague Orgy (1985)

(The above four books are collected as Zuckerman Bound)

The Counterlife (1986)

American Pastoral (1997)

I Married a Communist (1998)

The Human Stain (2000)

Exit Ghost (2007)

Roth novels

(1990)

Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)

The Plot Against America (2004)

Kepesh novels

The Breast (1972)

The Professor of Desire (1977)

The Dying Animal (2001)

Other novels

Goodbye, Columbus (1959)

Letting Go (1962)

When She Was Good (1967)

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Our Gang (1971)

The Great American Novel (1973)

My Life As a Man (1974)

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

'''

Nemeses: Short Novels

'''

Everyman (2006)

Indignation (2008)

The Humbling (2009)

Nemesis (2010)

Nonfiction

(1988)

(1991)

Collections

Reading Myself and Others (1976)

A Philip Roth Reader (1980, revised edition 1993)

Shop Talk (2001)

Library of America Editions

Edited by Ross Miller

Novels and Stories 1959-1962 (2005) ISBN 978-1-93108279-2

Novels 1967-1972 (2005) ISBN 978-1-93108280-8

Novels 1973-1977 (2006) ISBN 978-1-93108296-9

Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985 (2007) ISBN 978-1-59853-011-7

Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (2008) ISBN 978-1-59853-030-8

Novels 1993–1995 (2010) ISBN 978-1-59853-078-0

List of awards

1960 National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus

1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife

1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony

1994 PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock

1995 National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater

1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for American Pastoral

1998 Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist

1998 National Medal of Arts

2000 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France) for American Pastoral

2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for The Human Stain

2001 Gold Medal In Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters

2001 WH Smith Literary Award for The Human Stain

2002 National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

2002 Prix Médicis Étranger (France) for The Human Stain

2003 Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Harvard University

2005 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for The Plot Against America

2005 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction for The Plot Against America

2006 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement

2007 PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman

2007 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

2010 Paris Review's Hadada Prize

Notes

References

Brauner, David (1969) Getting in Your Retaliation First: Narrative Strategies in Portnoy's Complaint in Royal, Derek Parker (2005) Philip Roth: new perspectives on an American author, chapter 3

Saxton, Martha (1974) Philip Roth Talks about His Own Work Literary Guild June 1974, n.2. Also published in Philip Roth, George John Searles (1992) Conversations with Philip Roth p. 78

Further reading and literary criticism

Bloom, Harold and Welsch, Gabe, eds., Modern Critical Interpretations of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Chelsea House, 2003.

Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views of Philip Roth, Chelsea House, New York, 2003.

Cooper, Alan, Philip Roth and the Jews (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture), SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 1996.

Kinzel, Till, Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens. Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie (American Studies Monograph Series), Heidelberg: Winter, 2006.

Milowitz, Steven, Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer, Routledge, New York, 2000.

Morley, Catherine, The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature, Routledge, New York, 2008.

Parrish, Timothy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.

Podhoretz, Norman, "The Adventures of Philip Roth," Commentary (October 1998), reprinted as "Philip Roth, Then and Now" in The Norman Podhoretz Reader, 2004.

Posnock, Ross, Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2006.

Royal, Derek Parker, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, Praeger Publishers, Santa Barbara, CA, 2005.

Safer, Elaine B., Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture), SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 2006.

Searles, George J., ed., Conversations With Philip Roth, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, Mississippi, 1992.

Searles, George J., The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1984.

Shostak, Debra B., Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 2004.

Simic, Charles, "The Nicest Boy in the World," The New York Review of Books, Vol. LV, No. 15, 9 October 2008.

Wöltje, Wiebke-Maria, My finger on the pulse of the nation. Intellektuelle Protagonisten im Romanwerk Philip Roths (Mosaic, 26), Trier: WVT, 2006.

External links

Informational

Literary Encyclopedia biography

The Philip Roth Society

Philip Roth looks back on a legendary career, and forward to his final act

Interviews

Roth interview - from NPR's "Fresh Air", September 2005

Roth interview - from The Guardian, December 2005

Roth interview - from Open Source

Roth interview - from Der Spiegel, February 2008

Roth interview - from the London Times, October 17, 2009

Roth interview - from CBC's Writers and Company. Aired 2009-11-01

Category:1933 births Category:Living people Category:American novelists Category:American short story writers Category:American atheists Category:Jewish atheists Category:Bucknell University alumni Category:Jewish American writers Category:Jewish novelists Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:United States National Medal of Arts recipients Category:People from Newark, New Jersey Category:National Book Award winners Category:Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners Category:Sidewise Award winning authors Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:University of Iowa faculty Category:Princeton University faculty Category:University of Pennsylvania faculty Category:Writers from New Jersey Category:Iowa Writers' Workshop faculty Category:American Jews Category:Jews from Galicia (Eastern Europe) Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:Jewish American military personnel Category:Prix Médicis étranger winners

Name	Tina Brown
Birth name	Christina Hambley Brown
Caption	Tina Brown speaking at Barnes and Noble about The Diana Chronicles
Birth date	November 21, 1953
Birth place	Maidenhead, United Kingdom
Occupation	journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host, author

Tina Brown, Lady Evans, CBE (born Christina Hambley Brown on November 21, 1953, in Maidenhead, United Kingdom) is a journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author of The Diana Chronicles, a biography of Diana, Princess of Wales. Born a British citizen, she took United States citizenship in 2005 after emigrating in 1984 to edit Vanity Fair. Only 25, she had by then been editor-in-chief of Tatler magazine, and rose to prominence in the American media industry as the editor of the magazines Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992 and of The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998. In 2000 she was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for her services to overseas journalism a Thames village in the countryside west of London. Her father, George Hambley Brown, was a prominent figure in the British film industry. He produced the first Agatha Christie films starring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple. His other films included The Chiltern Hundreds (1949); Hotel Sahara (1951), starring Yvonne De Carlo; Guns at Batasi (1964), starring Richard Attenborough and Mia Farrow. In 1939, he had an early marriage to the actress Maureen O'Hara; according to O'Hara, it was never consummated owing to her parents' intervention, and it was annulled. George later met and married (1948) Bettina Iris Mary Kohr, who was an assistant to Laurence Olivier. In her later years, Bettina wrote for an English-language magazine for expatriates in Spain where she and her husband lived in retirement until moving to New York in the early eighties to be with their daughter and grandchildren.

School

In Brown's own words she was considered "an extremely subversive influence"

University

Brown entered Oxford university at the age of 17. Brown lives in New York City with Sir Harold Evans and their two children, a son, George born in 1986 and a daughter, Isabel, born in 1990. and was named magazine of the year in the industry awards of 1978. In 1982 when S. I. ("Si") Newhouse Jr., owner of Condé Nast Publications, bought Tatler Brown resigned to become a full-time writer again. Under Brown's editorship Vanity Fair won four National Magazine Awards, including a 1989 award for General Excellence.

One of her editorial decisions was in October 1990, two months after the first Gulf War had started, when she removed a picture of Marla Maples (a blonde) from the cover and replaced it with a photograph of Cher. The reason for her last minute decision, she told the Washington Post, was that "In light of the gulf crisis, we thought a brunette was more appropriate."

The New Yorker

In 1992, Brown accepted the company's invitation to become editor of The New Yorker, the fourth in its 73 year history and the first female to hold the position having been preceded by Harold Ross, William Shawn and Robert Gottlieb. She has related in speeches that before taking over, she immersed herself in vintage New Yorkers, reading the issues produced by founding editor Harold Ross. "There was an irreverence, a lightness of touch as well as a literary voice that had been obscured in later years when the magazine became more celebrated and stuffy." She added: "Rekindling that DNA became my passion."

Anxieties that Brown might change the identity of The New Yorker as a cultural institution prompted a number of resignations. Of them George Trow, who had been with the magazine for almost three decades, accused Brown of "kissing the ass of celebrity"

But Brown had the support of some New Yorker stalwarts including John Updike, Roger Angell, Brendan Gill, Lillian Ross, Calvin Tomkins, Janet Malcolm, Harold Brodkey and Philip Hamburger and newer staffers like Adam Gopnick and Nancy Franklin. During her editorship she let 79 go and engaged 50 new writers and editors including most of whom remain to this day: David Remnick (whom she nominated as her successor), Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane, Jane Meyer, Jeffrey Toobin, Under Brown its economic fortunes improved every year. In 1995 losses were about $17 million, in 1996 $14 million, by 1997 they'd been cut back to $11 million.

In 1998, Brown resigned from the New Yorker following an invitation from Harvey and Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films (then owned by the Disney Company) to be the chairman in a new multi-media company they intended to start with a new magazine, a book company and a television show. The Hearst company came in as partners with Miramax.

The departing verdicts after Brown's New Yorker tenure included:

}}

}}

Talk Magazine

Tina Brown next created Talk magazine, a monthly glossy, and appointed Jonathan Burnham and Susan Mercandetti to manage Talk Books. The magazine was due to be launched during a party at the Brooklyn Navy yard in New York City but was banned by the mayor Rudy Giuliani, who did not feel it was an appropriate use of the site. It was Brown's first very public failure but she had no regrets about embarking on the project. "My reputation rests on four magazines - three great successes, one that was a great experiment. I don't feel in any way let down. No big career doesn't have one flame out in it and there's nobody more boring than the undefeated." On being offered a lucrative deal with tight deadlines to write a book about Princess Diana, Brown resigned, airing her last Topic A interviews on May 29, 2005.

The Diana Chronicles

Brown's biography of Princess Diana, was published just before the 10th anniversary of her death in June 2007. The Diana Chronicles went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for hardback nonfiction, with two weeks in the number one position.

Publications

Bibliography

References

External links

Official Random House biography

washingtonpost.com: Tina Brown, archived columns of Brown's from The Washington Post

HuffPo: Tina Brown, archived columns of Brown's from The Huffington Post

The Daily Beast

Category:English journalists Category:English magazine editors Category:English immigrants to the United States Category:Alumni of St Anne's College, Oxford Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:People from Maidenhead Category:Washington Post people Category:Talk (magazine) people Category:New York Sun people Category:People from East Hampton (town), New York Category:1953 births Category:Living people Category:The New Yorker editors

Name	Eric Bogosian
Caption	Bogosian at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival
Birth date	April 24, 1953
Birth place	Woburn, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	Actor, playwright, monologist, novelist
Years active	1983–present
Spouse	Jo Anne Bonney (1980-present)
Website	http://www.ericbogosian.com/

Eric Bogosian (born April 24, 1953) is an American actor, playwright, monologist, and novelist.

Personal life

Bogosian, an Armenian American, was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, the son of Edwina, a hairdresser and instructor, and Henry Bogosian, an accountant. After graduating from Oberlin College, Bogosian moved to New York City to pursue a career in theatre. Bogosian has been married since 1980 to theater director Jo Bonney, with whom he has two children.

Career

Bogosian's best known work is Talk Radio, in which he starred Off Broadway and in the Oliver Stone film of the same name. In 2006, the play was brought to Broadway, garnering Tony nominations for the play and for Liev Schreiber, who starred. For the original stage version, Bogosian was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; for the film, he received the Berlin International Film Festival’s prestigious Silver Bear.

He has worked at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where at one performance in 1983 at The Circuit venue - a series of three adjoining tents in a construction site with a different show in each tent - the British comedian Malcolm Hardee became annoyed by what he regarded as excessive noise emanating nightly from Bogosian's neighbouring performance tent and famously drove a tractor - naked - through the middle of the performance. It has also been reported that the incident was as a result of Bogosian having refused to pay him back in a long-running feud over a fiver.

His play, subUrbia was produced by Lincoln Center Theater in 1994, adapted to the screen by Richard Linklater, and revived Off Broadway with an updated script in 2006. His most recent play, 1+1 was produced by New York Stage & Film in 2008.

Bogosian is well-known for the six Off Broadway solos he wrote for himself between 1980 and 2000. For these he was awarded three Obie Awards as well as the Drama Desk Award. The solos, including “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” and “Pounding Nails in the Floor with Forehead” are produced around the world and have become a mainstay of the American theater repertory.

He is the author of three novels and a novella. His latest, “Perforated Heart,” was published in the spring of 2009 by Simon & Schuster. His first novel, “Mall” is currently being adapted as a film.

Bogosian starred in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman at LAByrinth Theater. Currently on Broadway, he is reprising his role as Richard in Time Stands Still. Onscreen, Bogosian has been featured in films by Paul Schrader, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Robert Altman, Taylor Hackford, Atom Egoyan and Mike Judge. Other films include the action-adventure, “Under Siege II,” and the fact-based drama, “Wonderland.”

On television, he appeared as Captain Danny Ross in the long-running series, "," from 2006 to 2010. Captain Ross (Bogosian's character) is killed in the line of duty in the first part of the ninth season premiere.

In the 2010 he starred (with Laura Linney, Brian Darcy James, Alicia Silverstone and Christina Ricci) in Donald Margulies' play "Time Stands Still" on Broadway at the Manhattan Theater Club and in the fall at the Cort Theater.

Screen acting credits

Born In Flames (1983) (His first screen appearance)

Talk Radio (1988)

Suffering Bastards (1989)

Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll (1990)

Last Flight Out (1990)

Witch Hunt HBO (1994)

(1995)

The Thief and the Cobbler (1995) (voice) (Miramax version)

Dolores Claiborne (1995)

Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996) (voice)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

A Bright Shining Lie (1998) (TV Film)

Gossip (2000)

In The Weeds (2000)

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2001)

Igby Goes Down (2001)

Ararat (2002)

Scrubs: Season Two (2003)

Wonderland (2003)

King of the Corner (2004)

Heights (2004)

(2004)

Love Monkey TV series (2006)

TV series (2006–2010)

Writing credits

Men in Dark Times

Scenes from the New World

Sheer Heaven (1980)

Men Inside (1981)

The New World (1981)

FunHouse (1983)

Drinking in America (1986) (Winner of the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show)

Talk Radio (1987) (also film version 1988)

Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll (1990)

Notes from the Underground (1993)

Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead (1994)

subUrbia (1994) (also film version 1996)

Griller (1998)

Mall (2000)

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee (2000)

Humpty Dumpty (2004)

Non-profit Benefit

Red Angel

Wasted Beauty (2005)

Perforated Heart (novel) (2009)

" Love's Fire" 'General of Hot Desire' one act play

References

External links

Official Eric Bogosian website

Eric Bogosian at Anthem Online

Official Talk Radio on Broadway website

Category:1953 births Category:Living people Category:American dramatists and playwrights Category:American film actors Category:American television actors Category:American actors of Armenian descent Category:American people of Armenian descent Category:Actors from Massachusetts Category:New York City performance art Category:Oberlin College alumni Category:People from Middlesex County, Massachusetts

For the Kenyan economist, Obama's father, see Barack Obama, Sr.

Name	Barack Obama
Alt	A portrait shot of a serious looking middle-aged African-American male (Barack Obama) looking straight ahead. He has short black hair, and is wearing a dark navy blazer with a blue striped tie over a light blue collared shirt. In the background are two flags hanging from separate flagpoles: an American flag, and one from the Executive Office of the President.
Order	44th
Office	President of the United States
Vicepresident	Joe Biden
Term start	January 20, 2009
Predecessor	George W. Bush
Jr/sr2	United States Senator
State2	Illinois
Term start2	January 3, 2005
Term end2	November 16, 2008
Predecessor2	Peter Fitzgerald
Successor2	Roland Burris
State senate3	Illinois
State3	Illinois
District3	13th
Term start3	January 8, 1997
Term end3	November 4, 2004
Predecessor3	Alice Palmer
Successor3	Kwame Raoul
Birth date	August 04, 1961
Party	Democratic Party
Spouse	Michelle Robinson Obama
Children	MaliaSasha
Residence	White House (official)Chicago, Illinois (private)
Alma mater	Occidental CollegeColumbia UniversityHarvard University
Profession	Community organizerLawyerConstitutional law professorAuthor
Religion	Christianity
Signature	Barack Obama signature.svg
Signature alt	Barack Obama
Website	The White HouseBarack Obama
Footnotes

Barack Hussein Obama II (; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned after his election to the presidency in November 2008.

A native of Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.

Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid against a Democratic incumbent for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he ran for United States Senate in 2004. Obama Sr. remarried and returned to Kenya, visiting Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in 1982. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental's divestment from South Africa. In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in India and Pakistan for three weeks.

Later in 1981 he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relationsreprinted in: In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time. from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations,

University of Chicago Law School and civil rights attorney

In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book. He then served as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years—as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004—teaching constitutional law. In 1993 he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 13-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002.

From 1994 to 2002, Obama served on the boards of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project, and of the Joyce Foundation. He served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1999.

Legislative career: 1997–2008

State Senator: 1997–2004

Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois's 13th District, which at that time spanned Chicago South Side neighborhoods from Hyde Park – Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn.

In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority. Obama addressed the first high-profile Chicago anti-Iraq War rally, and spoke out against the war. He addressed another anti-war rally in March 2003 and told the crowd that "it's not too late" to stop the war.

Decisions by Republican incumbent Peter Fitzgerald and his Democratic predecessor Carol Moseley Braun not to contest the race resulted in wide-open Democratic and Republican primary contests involving fifteen candidates.

In July 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts,

Obama's expected opponent in the general election, Republican primary winner Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race in June 2004.

U.S. Senator: 2005–2008

, on October 28, 2006.]] Obama was sworn in as a senator on January 4, 2005, (the ranking has been criticized by liberal groups such as Media Matters for America

Legislation

(R-OK) and Obama discussing the Coburn–Obama Transparency Act Obama also sponsored a Senate amendment to the State Children's Health Insurance Program providing one year of job protection for family members caring for soldiers with combat-related injuries.

Presidential campaign: 2008

, Illinois, Feb. 10, 2007.]] On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois. The choice of the announcement site was viewed as symbolic Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed him on June 7, 2008. Obama delivered his acceptance speech, not at the convention center where the Democratic National Convention was held, on November 10, 2008.]]

During both the primary process and the general election, Obama's campaign set numerous fundraising records, particularly in the quantity of small donations. On June 19, 2008, Obama became the first major-party presidential candidate to turn down public financing in the general election since the system was created in 1976. On November 4, Obama won the presidency by winning 365 electoral votes to 173 received by McCain, capturing 52.9% of the popular vote to McCain's 45.7%, which is being distributed over the course of several years.

, Colorado. Vice President Joe Biden stands behind him.]] In March, Obama's Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, took further steps to manage the financial crisis, including introducing the Public-Private Investment Program for Legacy Assets, which contains provisions for buying up to $2 trillion in depreciated real estate assets. Obama intervened in the troubled automotive industry The CBO released a report stating that the stimulus bill increased employment by 1–2.1 million, He proposed an expansion of health insurance coverage to cover the uninsured, to cap premium increases, and to allow people to retain their coverage when they leave or change jobs. His proposal was to spend $900 billion over 10 years and include a government insurance plan, also known as the public option, to compete with the corporate insurance sector as a main component to lowering costs and improving quality of health care. It would also make it illegal for insurers to drop sick people or deny them coverage for pre-existing conditions, and require every American carry health coverage. The plan also includes medical spending cuts and taxes on insurance companies that offer expensive plans. Obama's granting of his first television interview as president to an Arabic cable network, Al Arabiya, was seen as an attempt to reach out to Arab leaders. .]] On June 26, 2009, in response to the Iranian government's actions towards protesters following Iran's 2009 presidential election, Obama said: "The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous. We see it and we condemn it." On December 1, 2009, Obama announced the deployment of an additional 30,000 military personnel to Afghanistan. During his pre-inauguration transition period and continuing into his presidency, Obama has delivered a series of weekly Internet video addresses. He plays basketball, a sport he participated in as a member of his high school's varsity team.]] Obama is a well known supporter of the Chicago White Sox, and threw out the first pitch at the 2005 ALCS when he was still a senator.

In December 2007, Money magazine estimated the Obama family's net worth at $1.3 million.See also: Their 2009 tax return showed a household income of $5.5 million—up from about $4.2 million in 2007 and $1.6 million in 2005—mostly from sales of his books.

On September 27, 2010, Obama released a statement commenting on his religious views saying "I'm a Christian by choice. My family didn't—frankly, they weren't folks who went to church every week. And my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church. So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead—being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me." Obama resigned from Trinity during the Presidential campaign after controversial statements made by Rev. Jeremiah Wright became public. After a prolonged effort to find a church to attend regularly in Washington, Obama announced in June 2009 that his primary place of worship would be the Evergreen Chapel at Camp David.

Notes

}}

References

Further reading

Curry, Jessica. "Barack Obama: Under the Lights", Chicago Life, Fall 2004. Retrieved on January 14, 2008.

Graff, Garrett. "The Legend of Barack Obama", Washingtonian, November 1, 2006. Retrieved on January 14, 2008.

Koltun, Dave (2005) "The 2004 Illinois Senate Race: Obama Wins Open Seat and Becomes National Political "Star"" in "The Road to Congress 2004" Editors: Sunil Ahuja (Youngstown State University) and Robert Dewhirst (Truman State University), Nova Science Publishers, Hauppauge, New York, Binding: Hardcover Pub. Date: 2005, ISBN 1-59454-360-7

Lizza, Ryan. "Above the Fray", GQ, September 2007. Retrieved on October 27, 2010.

MacFarquhar, Larissa. "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?", New Yorker, May 7, 2007. Retrieved on January 14, 2008.

McClelland, Edward, Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President, Bloomsbury Press, 2010.

Mundy, Liza. "A Series of Fortunate Events", The Washington Post Magazine, August 12, 2007. Retrieved on January 14, 2008.

Zutter, Hank De. "What Makes Obama Run?", Chicago Reader, December 8, 1995. Retrieved on January 14, 2008.

External links

;Official sites

President Barack Obama official White House website

* Full transcript and video of President Obama's inaugural address (from whitehouse.gov)

BarackObama.com (official website)

;Directories ;News media

Collected news and commentary at The New York Times

;Government service links

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