US: When Barack Obama exploded onto the national political scene at the 2004 Democratic convention, he was still an almost unknown state legislator from Illinois.
In the keynote address to the convention, he demonstrated his exceptional oratorical gifts, echoing the cadences of black preachers to enunciate his vision of reconciliation in America.
"There's not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America, there is the United States of America," he said.
Mr Obama's meteoric political rise, which has led him to run for president after only two years in the US Senate, is part of a personal biography with few parallels in American political history.
Born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, he moved to Indonesia as a teenager, attending Catholic and Muslim schools there, before returning to Hawaii to complete his secondary education. Mr Obama's father left for Harvard when the boy was two and then returned to Kenya to pursue a political career until he died in 1982.
Mr Obama recalls meeting his father only once, when he was 10.
After undergraduate studies in Los Angeles and at Columbia University in New York, he went to Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
It was at Harvard that he met his wife, Michelle, a formidable and committed political activist who remains his closest political adviser. They moved to Chicago, and in 1993 he became a lecturer in law at the University of Chicago.
In 1996 Mr Obama ran for the Illinois state senate and served as a state senator until his election to the US Senate in 2004. With his rivals embroiled in personal scandals and fresh from his triumph at the Democratic convention, he won the 2004 election and entered the senate as a fully-formed political star.
Popular among colleagues for his modest response to his own fame and his generosity in campaigning for other Democrats last November, Mr Obama has not shied away from criticising African-Americans, as he did in a 2004 speech.
"Go into any inner-city neighbourhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach our kids to learn -- they know that parents have to teach, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectation and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know these things," he said.
At 45, Mr Obama is the author of two bestselling books, the autobiographical Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope, a critique of the American political system and an outline of his vision for the future. Denis Staunton