Born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, Obama was the son of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya who left to study economics at Harvard, and then returned to Kenya, seeing his son just once afterwards.

Obama was raised by his mother's parents. In 2006, he visited his father's mother in Kenya.

Obama's mother remarried and moved to Indonesia, where he lived from age 6 to 10. But he mostly grew up inj Hawaii with his grand-parents, Stanley Dunham, a furniture salesman an Grandma "Foot", who worked in a bank.

Obama attended the Punahou School , an elite prep school in Honolulu. Two pages from his 1978 Senior Class yearbook show his playing basketball and going by the name of Barry. He later insisted on the name on his birth certificate (Barack, which was also his father's name), which means "blessed" in Arabic.

Obama went on to graduate from Columbia university. After graduating from college, Obama worked for 3 years, first in Harlem and then in Chicago as a community organizer.

He then attended Harvard Law School, where he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Upon graduating, he returned to Chicago working as a Civil Rights lawyer and lecturing on the Constitutionnal law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Obama married Michele Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate whom he had met in Chicago, on October 18, 1992. The Obamas have two daughters, malia, born in 1999, and Natasha, born in 2001. Four years after they married, Obama won a seat in the Illinois State Legislature, sponsoring legislation on the death penalty and racial profiling.