Dec 25, 2009

Things Fall Apart | Overview

The Life and Work of Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe is one of Africa’s most influential writers. Things Fall Apart, Achebe’s first novel, was published in 1958, just before Nigeria gained independence. The title of the novel echoes W. B. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” which describes history as a succession of gyres, or spirals. Achebe applies the image to Africa as the nineteenth century traditional world of the Igbo people gives way to the colonial forces of the twentieth century.

Things Fall Apart is based upon Achebe’s life experience. Born in 1930,...