In 2007, as Barack Obama mounted his unlikely presidential campaign, Ta-Nehisi Coates was delivering deli sandwiches to generate the income his sputtering writing career was not. A decade later, he would be sparring over politics and policy with Obama in the White House. America’s first Black president cared a lot about what Coates—by then the winner of a National Book Award and numerous other acclamations—thought about various matters.

What changed across that decade? Not Coates himself. He was the same restlessly curious writer and thinker throughout—the same person he’d been, really, as a nerdy kid growing up in West Baltimore, playing video games and trying to stay alive during the crack epidemic. When he misbehaved as a child—and he misbehaved a lot, getting suspended from school—his mother made him write essays.

In 2008, a reported essay for The Atlantic, led to a job as a writer and blogger. His breadth of interests—from comic books to the Civil War to French linguistics—won him readers. But it was his writings on race that propelled him to the front rank, a reluctant prophet and an ambivalent patriot. Coates keeps his readers’ eyes trained on the country’s murderous failings while also pointing to its potential to overcome (or at least mitigate) them. His work nudges the arc of the moral universe toward progress, even if he himself is not convinced it bends there.