Free Books That Inspired Barack Obama

By Jason Boog 

President Barack Obama has won the 2012 Presidential election. We’ve collected links to five free eBooks that inspired Obama during his road to the Presidency.

In a 2009 essay, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wr0te about the books that inspired the President. Here’s an excerpt:

Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead” are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

5 Free eBooks That Inspired Barack Obama

1. Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (contained in this volume of essays)

2. Complete Project Gutenberg Abraham Lincoln Writings by Abraham Lincoln

3. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

4. The Complete Works by William Shakespeare

5. The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version