Things Fall Apart Writing Assignment

Things Fall Apart is acclaimed as the finest novel written about life in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenth century. Published in 1958, it is unquestionably the world’s most widely read African novel, having sold more than eight million copies in English and been translated into fifty languages. But it offers far more than access to pre-colonial Nigeria and the cataclysmic changes brought about by the British. It also can be a window into the story of the Aborigines in Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, and the First Nations of North, Central, and South America in the “falling apart” of the indigenous cultures of these and other places whose centers could not hold.

Chinua Achebe is the ideal teller of this story, born in Nigeria in 1930 and growing up in the Igbo town of Ogidi. He spoke Igbo at home and studied English in school, imbibing the dual culture. In an autobiographical essay, he describes his childhood as being “at the crossroads of cultures.” In the course of a distinguished academic and literary career, much of it in exile, Achebe has been the recipient of many awards, beginning with the Margaret Wrong Memorial Prize in 1959 for Things Fall Apart and including more than thirty honorary doctorates. Achebe is in great demand throughout the world as a speaker and visiting lecturer, and is presently teaching at Bard College in New York.