In his 2011 quasi-novel The Social Animal, David Brooks used a literary device that I'd never seen before: the book tracks two fictional characters from birth to old age, but, as Brooks explained:
"The story takes place perpetually in the current moment, the early twenty-first century, because I want to describe different features of the way we live now …"
I recently asked where Brooks got this ploy. Surely some other author has used this. So far, nobody has come up with an antecedent. However, a commenter points out a likely influence of Brooks' approach:
John Mansfield said...
"Life of Julia had this quality, the one about the woman who advanced from childhood to old age, assisted at each stage by the Obama administration."
Bingo.
Obama is a Brooks fan. Brooks' The Social Animal came out about a year before the Obama campaign's Life of Julia website debuted in the first half of 2012.