Chinua Achebe

Born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, a large Igbo village in colonial Nigeria, Achebe grew up at the crossroads of worlds: his father was one of the first converts to Christianity in the region, his grandfather a man of traditional authority. He was raised speaking Igbo at home and learned English at eight when he entered the Church Missionary Society school. A scholarship took him to Government College Umuahia and then to University College Ibadan, where he abandoned the name Albert, calling it a tribute to "a prince consort who was not mine." Things Fall Apart (1958), written in his twenties while working at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, transformed African literature overnight, offering the first major novel to tell the story of colonialism from the African side. No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) extended the project. During the Biafran War he served as a roving ambassador for the breakaway republic, and the defeat of Biafra in 1970 shattered his faith in the Nigerian state. A Man of the People (1966) had eerily predicted the military coup that launched the conflict. A car accident in 1990 left him paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair for the remaining twenty-three years of his life. He died in Boston on March 21, 2013, at eighty-two. Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than fifty languages and has sold over twenty million copies.

In 1957 Achebe mailed the only handwritten manuscript of Things Fall Apart to a London typing agency, with a fee of twenty-two pounds. Months of silence followed. When his colleague Angela Beattie visited the office in person, the pages were found gathering dust in a corner. One typed copy came back to Lagos; there was no other.