Things Fall Apart
By Chinua Achebe
(Anchor, Paperback, 9780385474542, 224pp.)
Publication Date: September 1, 1994
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback (September 2008), Paperback (September 2008), Compact Disc (December 2003), Paperback (June 2002), Paperback (April 2000), Paperback (November 1996), Paperback (December 1995), Hardcover (October 17, 1995), Mass Market Paperback (February 1982), Paperback (December 1968)
Categories: Literary
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Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries.
These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.
Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan.
Cited in the London Sunday Times as one of the "1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century" for defining "a modern African literature that was truly African" and thereby making "a major contribution to world literature," Chinua Achebe has published novels short stories, essays, and children's books. His volume of poetry, Christmas in Biafra, written during the Biafran War, was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Of his novels, Arrow of God won the New Statesman--Jock Campbell Award, and Anthills of the Savannah was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe's masterpiece, has been published in fifty different languages and has sold millions of copies in the United States since its original publication in 1958-1959.
Mr. Achebe lives with his wife in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where they teach at Bard College. They have four children and three grandchildren.
“Things Fall Apart may well be Africa's best loved novel. . . . For so many readers around the world, it is Chinua Achebe who opened up the magic casements of African fiction.”
—Kwame Anthony Appiah
“Achebe is gloriously gifted with the magic of an ebullient, generous, great talent.”
—Nadine Gordimer, The New York Times Book Review
"A vivid imagination illuminates every page. . . . This novel genuinely succeeds in penetrating tribal life from the inside."
—Times Literary Supplement
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