Chinua Achebe is one of the founders of the new literature movement in Africa and many critics have come to consider him the finest Nigerian novelist of his generation. His achievements, however, have not been limited to his own country and he is considered by many to be one of the best novelists now writing in the English language.
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born in 1930 in Ogidi, Nigeria. He attended Government College in Umuahia from 1944 to 1947 and University College in Ibadan from 1948 to 1953. In 1953 he left Nigeria to study in London and received a B.A. from London University and went on to study broadcasting at the British Broadcasting Corp.
He returned to Nigeria in 1956 and began work for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos.
Fascinated by world religions and traditional African culture, Achebe began writing while at University. Upon his return to Nigeria, he began work on what would become his most famous work.
Achebe consciously avoided imitating the trends in English literature, although he defended the use of English. He successfully took a European art form and transformed it into an African one. Achebe embraced the idea at the heart of the African oral tradition: that “art is, and always was, at the service of man. Our ancestors created their myths and told their stories for a human purpose.” Achebe stated that “any good story, any good novel, should have a message, should have a purpose.” “Things Fall Apart” was published in 1958, to almost instant worldwide acclaim and became the biggest selling book by a modern African writer. Achebe followed up with two sequels of sorts to the novel -- “No Longer At Ease” was published two years later and “Arrow of God” in 1964.
In 1967, Nigeria descended into civil war when the province of Biafra attempted to gain independence from Nigeria. Achebe became a champion of Biafran independence and his fame raised the profile of the war and the resulting famine in the West. In 1970, Nigeria retook the region and Achebe unable to tolerate the new regime moved to the United States.
He continued to teach and lecture in the US. His lecture “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness” became the focus of controversy and forced considerable intellectual reexamination of western portrayals of Africa and Africans.
He published another best seller “Anthills of the Savannah” in 1987. Following a car crash that left him partially disabled, he returned to Nigeria in 1990.
Achebe's novels focus on the traditions of traditional society, the effect of Christianity and the clash of cultures during and after the colonial era. He has also published a number of short stories, children's books, and essay collections.
He is currently the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart is the perhaps the most famous African novel in English. Although there were earlier examples, notably by Achebe’s fellow Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, none has been so influential, not only on African literature, but also on literature around the world.
Published in 1958, while Africa was still extracting itself from its colonial past, the novel creates a complex and sympathetic portrait of traditional village culture in Africa. Achebe not only to informed the outside world about Ibo cultural traditions, but to reminded Nigerians of their own past. Prior to the publication of Things Fall Apart, most “African” literature” had been written by Europeans like Conrad and Joyce Cary. Even Africans in his time were ready to accept the European judgment that Africa had no history or culture worth considering.
Achebe’s novel gives importance to traditional values and ideas and is a rejection of the European stereotypes of Africa as a heart of darkness, populated by a primitive monoculture.
Language is an important aspect of the novel, using English but in a way that conveys the complexity of Ibo speech and rejecting the pidgin English employed by other writers to convey African dialects.
The novel concerns the life of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion, his three wives, his children and the influences of British colonialism and Christianity on his Ibo community during an unspecified time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.
Achebe took the title of the novel from a poem by Yeats. In “The Second Coming,” Yeats, writing after the First World War saw a new and dangerous world rising from the ashes of the old.