Obama biography by 'New Yorker' editor due out in spring

(AFP / Saul LOEB)

A biography of US President Barack Obama by The New Yorker editor David Remick is due to be published in spring 2010, announced UK trade magazine The Bookseller on February 25. The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama will be published in the US by Knopf on April 6 and in the UK by Picador on May 28.

The book's US publisher reports that The Bridge looks at both the life of the American president and the history of race in America. While several books about Obama are currently in the pipeline, The Bridge is likely to distinguish itself by its focus on Obama's rise to the presidency, rather than his time in the Oval Office.

For the biography, Remnick has conducted hundreds of interviews with family, friends, teachers, professors, mentors, donors, and rivals of Barack Obama, as well as with President Obama himself. The Bridge will also include correspondence by Obama and previously unpublished letters written by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.

David Remnick, editor of prestigious American magazine The New Yorker since 1998, won a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his book Lenin's Tomb, about the collapse of the Soviet Union. He also wrote the critically acclaimed 1999 book King of the World, on the evolution of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali in the midst of the civil rights movement.