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Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world…

—“Pop,” by Barack Obama, Occidental College literary magazine, Feast, spring 1982

At 22, Obama graduates college and enters the real world. The first job he lands, in 1983, is not the one of legend, the formative yes-we-can mission of community organizing. Rather, it’s a gig editing and writing business publications. His supervisor figures him for a frustrated novelist.

Two years later, he’s in Chicago, stepping out into a world where King marched, where a black man, Harold Washington, is mayor for the first time, and where public housing has been left to rot in the sunny Reagan era. As the 24-year-old director of the Developing Communities Project, he frequents the Jazz Showcase, the museums, the bookstores, and the Hyde Park Hair Salon, where Muhammad Ali used to go. But his ambitions are focused, according to the man who hired him as an organizer, Jerry Kellman: “When he came to Chicago, he had two dreams. The one was working for social change. The other was that he would write fiction. His aspiration was to write a novel. We talked about it at great length.”

Kellman recalls something else, too—namely, that his young subordinate struggled early on at organizing because “his analytical side kept him from intimacy with these folks. But what he had going for him, once he began to unpack it, was story. I mean, community organizing is all about narrative at every level. Politics is also about narrative. How do we understand ourselves? Through stories.”

The organizers keep journals so they can file weekly reports of their interactions with the inner-city community. But Obama also maintains a second journal, one of “personal recollections and things like that,” according to one of his friends and co-workers, Johnnie Owens. It’s good material, this world he inhabits of crumbling tenements. He shows Kellman and another co-worker, Mike Kruglik, two short stories he has written. Both stories are about a minister of a storefront church in the inner city. Reading them, Kellman thinks, Hmm. Really strong on character. Still struggling with dialogue. Kruglik wonders, Man, all this evocative description of the landscape and deterioration on the South Side in wintertime, the gray sky.… Am I sure Barack actually wrote these?

The material is irresistible—and Obama’s not the only one who thinks so. Less than two years after he departs Chicago for Harvard Law, his peers elect him president of the Law Review, the first African-American to hold such an honor…and, well, now there’s a story! A New York Times reporter hoofs it up to Cambridge, and his article, published February 6, 1990, is the first to describe the meanderings of the biracial Hawaiian who was now declaring Chicago his home. Among those taking note are several book publishers and a young woman named Jane Dystel, who works in the Flatiron district with renowned literary agent Jay Acton, whose clients include James Baldwin, Tip O’Neill, and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. Acton says to Dystel, The guy could be another Baldwin—maybe we could get another Fire Next Time out of him. Dystel contacts Obama: There’s a book in all this. Obama has thought about writing a novel but never a memoir. Still, he has student loans, so why not? Dystel helps him fashion a book proposal, she submits it to multiple publishers—and on November 28, 1990, the Simon & Schuster imprint Poseidon Press issues a six-figure contract to 29-year-old Barack Obama for a book tentatively titled Journeys in Black and White.

The newly anointed author doesn’t start writing right away. He takes his law degree back to Chicago, where everyone wants a piece of the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. Obama has his pick of law firms and winds up selecting Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland but informs them that he’s not ready to start just yet because he wants to work on the 1992 voter-registration drive, plus he’s got a book to write. He says the same thing to the faculty-appointments chair of the University of Chicago Law School, Doug Baird, who, hoping to keep Obama on the hook, offers him an office on the sixth floor of the law school to use for writing. And so Obama spends the years 1991 and 1992 at his desk with a view onto the once lovely neighborhood of Woodlawn, devastated by the 1968 riots following King’s assassination, grinding away on the manuscript that he originally described to Baird as “a book about voting rights” but which, a month into writing, he tells Baird has morphed into autobiography.…

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