Exclusive: My Occidental College Love Letters [College]

Today, Vanity Fair published several excerpts from the romantic correspondence of a young Barack Obama, displaying a penetrating mind and an impressive command of language on the part of the future president, who had just transferred from Occidental College to Columbia. His letters, as biographer David Maraniss writes, “wove [their] way though literature, politics, and personal philosophy”; our own Maureen O’Connor notes that they “reference T.S. Eliot, ‘bourgeois liberalism,’ and Jacques Derrida.” More »