Back in March, the New York Times examined Barack Obama, the author.

The story contained this intriguing nugget:

When his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention sent his memoir soaring out of obscurity and straight onto the best-seller list, he untethered himself from his longtime literary agent in favor of Robert B. Barnett, the Washington lawyer who had gotten Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton an $8 million book advance and then landed Mr. Obama a $1.9 million, three-book deal.

Who was that longtime literary agent Obama abandoned, er, untethered?  Jane Dystel .. and the Times story had more:

Two weeks before Mr. Obama’s swearing in, Crown announced that it had signed a contract with him for three more books. The first would offer “a window into the political and spiritual convictions that propelled Obama’s recent U.S. Senate victory.” The second will be a children’s book about his life, and the third is yet to be defined. The deal had been initiated by Ms. Dystel, the announcement said, but “negotiated and concluded by Robert B. Barnett of Williams & Connolly LLP.”

What happened between Mr. Obama and Ms. Dystel is not clear. Ms. Dystel declined to be interviewed for this article. Mr. Obama said, “It really had more to do with the fact that by the time ‘The Audacity of Hope’ was written, I was going to be in Washington and was obviously now very high profile.”

Talk about a glowing self-evaluation.

That episode in Obama’s life is revisted in the December 2008 issue of The Washingtonian magazine, in a profile of super-lawyer Barnett:

In 2004, Barnett receieved a call from a new young US senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.  Years earlier, an enterprising New York agent, Jane Dystel, had discovered Obama and persuaded him to write Dreams From My Father, the story of how the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.  She had gotten the idea for the book after seeing a news clip about the law student in the New York Times.

Now that Obama was a senator, Dystel wanted him to reissue his book and write another one.  But Obama ditched the agent who had discovered him and turned to Barnett to negotiate the reissue of Dreams From My Father and sell The Audacity of Hope.

OK, this time, instead of untethered, we get ditched.  Either way, sounds like when it came to Obama’s career and book ambitions, change really was the operative word.