Barack Obama would tell the story in his own memoir, "Dreams from My Father," and it would be retold — with additions and amendments — by others, including Scott, New Yorker editor David Remnick and Washington Post writer David Maraniss. The outlines basically remain the same:

—How he spent his youth alternately in the care of his grandparents in Hawaii and his mother, who moved to Indonesia and a short-lived marriage to a geologist there. In Indonesia he would eat dog and snake; in Hawaii he would sample marijuana, and sample it some more.

—How he went on to Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law, and along the way struggled to come to terms with his identity as a black man of mixed heritage in a white society. Genevieve Cook, a girlfriend of Obama's from New York, told Maraniss how "he felt like an impostor. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body." And that she would later realize that, "in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black."

—How he ended up in Chicago as a community organizer, working on the South Side. In doing so, he would credit his mother and her work in Indonesia as his inspiration.

Much has been made of the omissions and inaccuracies found by Obama's biographers in his memoir. For example, Obama did not identify Cook, and would acknowledge later that he conflated her with another girlfriend. Some of Obama's opponents saw these discrepancies as evidence of slickness, or even con-artistry.