Obama's 'American Story' Faces Fresh Scrutiny: Do Memoir Fibs Matter?

President Obama detailed his early life in an autobiography he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Obama begins the book noting that he changed the names of people, compressed characters together, and compressed the chronology for the sake of narrative flow. A new book suggests that Obama did more than create anonymity for characters and "compress" timelines.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Washington Post editor David Maraniss wrote Barack Obama: The Story, a deeply researched, 600-page study of the president's ancestry and early life. The book details over 36 accounts of discrepancies between reality and Obama's memoir.

Gerald Early, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis dismissed the criticism toward Obama and the discrepancies as immaterial. "It really doesn't matter if he made up stuff," Early told Fox News. "I mean, after all, it's like you going to a psychiatrist and you make up stuff, and the psychiatrist can still psychoanalyze you because they're your lies... Autobiographies are not really good sources if you're looking for absolute complete factual accounts of someone's life," agreed Professor Early. "Autobiographies serve another kind of purpose for the person writing the book. I don't think it much matters whether Barack Obama has told the absolute truth in Dreams From My Father. What's important is how he wanted to construct his life."

FOXNEWS.COM reports:
A new book is questioning alleged discrepancies in President Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father.