Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s book Things Fall Apart, first published by William Heinemann in 1958, was well received in the British press with positive reviews from critic Walter Allen and novelist Angus Wilson. Three days after publication, the Times Literary Supplement wrote that the book “genuinely manages to present tribal life from the inside.” The Observer called it “an excellent novel”, and the literary magazine Time and Tide said that “Mr. Achebe’s style is a model for aspirants”.

Initial reception in Nigeria was mixed. Hill’s attempts to promote the book in West Africa were met with skepticism and ridicule. The faculty at the University of Ibadan were amused by the idea of ​​a former student writing a worthwhile novel. Others were more supportive. A review in Black Orpheus magazine stated: “The book as a whole creates for the reader such a vivid picture of Ibo life that the plot and characters are little more than symbols representing a way of life irrevocably lost to the living memory.

A snap event in Nigeria but slightly revised in the US when first published (the initial New York Times review was under 500 words)

No book by an African has been as deeply discussed or as influential. “There were books by Africans before ‘Everything Falls Apart,’ but this is the one they all come back to,” says Kwame Anthony Appiah, a leading African academic who wrote the introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of “Things Fall Apart”.

Things Fall Apart has become one of the most important books in African literature. Its publication is often cited as the birth of modern African literature, and since its publication the book has sold over 12 million copies in 50 countries. It has been translated into more than 50 languages, making its author the most translated African author of all time. It has appeared on numerous lists of the 100 best novels of all time, including those published in Norway (Norwegian Book Club), England (Guardian and Observer), America (Radcliffe Publishing Course’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century; Magazine Time) and Africa (The best African books of the 20th century). It remains required reading in schools and universities around the world and is one of the most widely read and influential books ever written. It has generated a great deal of literary criticism challenging Achebe’s unsentimental portrayals of tradition, religion, manhood, and the colonial experience. Its immediate success secured Achebe’s position both in Nigeria and in the West as a pre-eminent voice among Africans writing in English.

The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote that for Americans it is “the quintessential novel about Africa”. Indeed, it is the basis of the introduction to the continent for tens of thousands of university students, and forms many of our ideas of place even today.

In 1992, Achebe became the only living author represented in the prestigious Everyman’s Library collection published by Alfred A. Knopf. His 60th birthday was celebrated at the University of Nigeria by “an international who’s who in African literature”. One observer noted, “Nothing like this had ever happened before in African literature anywhere on the continent.” Work that, like the works of Shakespeare, lends itself to multiple layers of interpretation that are revealed with each new reading is now included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Many writers in subsequent generations credit this work with paving the way for their efforts. One of Nigeria’s most celebrated young writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, says that she read Things Fall Apart when she was around 8 years old and has reread it periodically. “I realized that I liked the same things every time, the familiarity with it. I hadn’t realized that people like me could be in a book,” she explains.

Many others, from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who once called “Everything Falls Apart” an “education important” for me, to Ha Jin, a Chinese-American novelist, have cited Achebe’s remarkable feat. Achebe himself recalls some letters she received a decade ago from students at a women’s college in South Korea:

“I was also surprised in the sense that I realized that people in different places would be reading it from totally different positions, positions that I didn’t think they knew about,” he says.

“They (students) told me, many of them, that this was like their story. And I said to myself: ‘Korea? I don’t know Korea. And I don’t know what his story is.’ They explained that they too were colonized, by the Japanese, that simple fact of colonization was enough for someone so far away to quickly accept this story.

Achebe subsequently wrote several novels covering more than a century of African history. Although most of them deal specifically with Nigeria, they are also emblematic of Africa’s “metaphysical landscape”, a view of the world and the entire cosmos perceived from a particular vantage point. Achebe, 78, has written five novels, including Arrow of God (1964) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987), five nonfiction books, and several collections of short stories and poems.

Although Achebe encourages Third World writers to stay where they are and write about their own countries, as a way to help achieve balance in storytelling, he himself has lived in the United States for the past ten years, a reluctant exile. .

Things Fall Apart is being celebrated, according to event organizers to mark 50 years since its first publication, due to several accolades it has earned, including the following:

o It is the first authentic African story told in the authentic original African style.

o Answered some critical socio-anthropological questions posed by previous non-African writers.

o It opened the great door for Africans to write about Africa, which has led to what it is today, African literature, and is leading the way some thirty years after the book was written, for Achebe’s compatriot Wole Soyinka, has won the Nobel Prize. by other Africans.

o The book has been translated into more than 50 languages

o It has more than 12 million copies in print.

o The book has over 50 awards to its name and counting.

o Mainly because of the success of this book, the author has been counted as one of the hundred most intelligent men of the last century.

o The book clearly represents excellence in quality writing as well as the enduring power of value in creative work. It also speaks to the power of hard work and its accompanying bonus, success.

At the age of 78, Chinua Achebe lives in grace and exile, housed in a purpose-built cabin on the Bard College campus. Achebe came to Bard in 1990, shortly after a car accident in Nigeria left him paralyzed from the waist down.

On March 22, 1990, Achebe was traveling in a car to Lagos when an axle suddenly collapsed and the car overturned. His son and the driver suffered minor injuries, but the weight of the vehicle fell on Achebe, seriously damaging his spine. He was airlifted to a hospital in Buckinghamshire England and treated. In July, doctors announced that although he was recovering well, he was paralyzed from the waist down and would require the use of a wheelchair for the rest of his life. While recovering in this hospital, he received a call from Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, offering him a teaching job and a house built for his needs. Achebe thought he would be at Bard, a small school in a quiet corner of the Hudson River Valley, for just a year or two, but the worsening political situation in Nigeria, especially during General Sani Abacha’s military dictatorship from 1993 to 1998, with much of Nigeria’s wealth going into its leader’s pocket, and public infrastructure such as hospitals and roads, withering prompted him to extend his stay. Achebe’s concern for the state of his country is seen in his refusal to accept one of Nigeria’s highest honours: Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR). However, he is waiting for healthy and hopeful signs for her to return.

Shortly after his discharge from the hospital, Achebe became the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages ​​and Literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; a position he has held for more than fifteen years. As a long-time language arts teacher, he speaks warmly of students who seem to know their work well, but Achebe hasn’t finished a novel in over 20 years, having no desire to set any fiction in the USA. , saying that it would not be “the most important thing for me, because there are many people doing it”. While he is currently working on two or three projects, nothing is close to completion and he acknowledges that “certainly a novel is behind schedule.” In October 2005, the Financial Times reported that he planned to write a novel for the Canongate Myth Series, a series of novellas in which contemporary authors reinvent and rewrite ancient myths from countless cultures. Achebe’s novel has not yet been scheduled for publication.

A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize Achebe won last year In June 2007, the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction. Achebe, often referred to as the father of African literature, has received numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award; the Margaret Wrong Award; the Nigerian National Trophy in 1961; and the Nigerian National Merit Award, Nigeria’s highest recognition of intellectual achievement, in 1979. Achebe is an Honorary Member of the Modern Language Association of America (1975); member of the Royal Society of Literature in London (1981); and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1982). He has been awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Most recently, in November of last year, he received the prestigious National Medal of Honor for literature from the National Club of the Arts of the United States.

Professor Achebe has also received forty honorary degrees from universities in England, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria and the United States, including Dartmouth (1972), Harvard (1996), Brown (1998), Southampton, Guelph (Canada), City of the Cape (2002) and the University of Ife (Nigeria). In 1982, when he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Kent, Professor Robert Gibson told the ceremony that the Nigerian author “is now revered as a Master by the younger generation of African writers and it is to him that they regularly turn.” looking for advice and inspiration.” His impact resonates strongly in literary circles. Novelist Margaret Atwood called him “a magical writer, one of the greatest of the twentieth century.” Maya Angelou praised Things Fall Apart as a book in which “all readers meet their brothers, sisters, parents and friends and themselves along the roads of Nigeria.” Nelson Mandela, recalling his time as a political prisoner, once referred to Achebe as a writer “in whose company prison walls came crashing down.”

In June 2007, when Achebe received the Man Booker International Prize, the judging panel included American critic Elaine Showalter, who said he “lit the way for writers from around the world who were searching for new words and forms for new realities and societies.” “; and South African writer Nadine Gordimer, who said that Achebe has achieved “what one of his characters brilliantly defines as the writer’s purpose: ‘newfound expression’ to capture the complexity of life.”