Emory University to make public letters from Obama’s youth

Emory University has obtained a series of handwritten notes that former President Obama sent to his girlfriend in the 1980s.

The letters, which were obtained by the university’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library in Atlanta, will be made available to the public, The New York Times reported.

The series includes nine letters Obama wrote to Alexandra McNear, who was his girlfriend at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

{mosads}”Your call gave me a boost,” said one of the letters from Obama, written in April 1984.

“Somehow a clutter of numbers and appointments and bills had grown over your last letter,” Obama wrote at the time. “Hearing your voice was like discovering a passage in a book I had read a while ago.”

In another letter from April 1983, Obama wrote: “I feel sunk in that long corridor between old values, actions, modes of thought, and those that I seek, that I’m working towards.”

In November 1983, Obama wrote during his time looking for work in New York that, “Salaries in the community organizations are too low to survive on right now.”

“So I hope to work in some more conventional capacity for a year, allowing me to store up enough nuts to pursue those interests next,” he wrote.

When he was working for Business International Corporation in New York in April 1984, Obama also addressed his future, writing, “My ideas aren’t as crystallized as they were while in school, but they have an immediacy and weight that may be more useful if and when I’m less observer and more participant.”

Rosemary Magee, the director of the library, said the letters help people to learn about a “young man who is yet to become or even dream about becoming President Obama.”

“It’s a story of a journey over a couple of years about a sense of self-understanding, self-definition and his understanding of himself and place in the world,” she told The New York Times.

An associate professor of political science at Emory University said the letters aren’t “particularly personal.”

“You’re coming in at these letters at a point in President Obama’s and Alex McNear’s relationship where you can see the arc of the breakup that’s going to happen,” Andra Gillespie said.

“Their relationship, at the point that we’re reading it, is very intellectual and they’re clearly struggling with each other,” she added. “They’re both trying to find themselves and they’re having tough intellectual conversations with each other.”