Barack Obama, The Most Famous Law Student in America

OBAMA FOR USA. "Dreams From My Father" ends with Barack Obama's first journey to Kenya, where he went after receiving his acceptance letter from Harvard Law School. He met his half-brothers and half-sisters, forging new relationships with his father's African family, including his step-grandmother, Sarah, who helped raise his father in the same way his grandmother, Toot, looked after Barack.

He was older than the other first-year students at Harvard and at the end of the year he won a coveted slot as one of about 80 editors of the prestigious law review, the most influential in the country. That summer, he worked as a summer associate at Chicago's Sidley & Austin, where he met and fell in love with another young Harvard Law grad, Michelle Robinson. They continued a long-distance courtship.

The next year, in February 1990, after a deliberation that took 17 hours, he won the law review's presidency with support from politically conservative students. Weeks before the voting he had made a speech in favor of affirmative action that so eloquently summarized the arguments against it that conservatives believed he would give their concerns a fair shake.

Mr. Obama sometimes joked that the presidency of the Harvard Law Review was the second-hardest elective office in the country to win. He was the first black elected in its 104-year history and the election made him an instant celebrity, including a profile in The New York Times.

From Harvard he returned to Chicago, where he worked on a voter registration drive, started work at a small law firm specializing in civil rights cases and taught at the University of Chicago Law School. In 1992, he and Michelle were married.

A Harvard Law connection, Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge who had been impressed by Mr. Obama's editing of an article he wrote at Harvard, put him on the path to a fellowship at the law school, which provided an office and a computer, which he used to write "Dreams From My Father."

He taught three courses, the most original of which was on racism and the law, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one. He refined his public speaking style. He was wary of noble theories, his students said. He was, rather, a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.

Religion had begun playing a role in his life before he went to Harvard, and he had joined Trinity United Church of Christ, led by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who later presided at the Obamas' marriage. One of the pastor's sermons had inspired both the title of Mr. Obama's second book and his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, "The Audacity of Hope." The ties between the young couple and the sometimes incendiary pastor would cause an unanticipated firestorm during the 2008 presidential primaries.