Chinua Achebe was born in the Igbo town of Ogidi, in southeastern Nigeria, then a British colony. His parents were Christian converts, and his father was a church teacher. He grew up between two worlds: the hymns and Bible of the mission, and the stories, proverbs and festivals of the older Igbo life that still surrounded him. At university in Ibadan he switched from medicine to English, and there he read novels by Europeans about Africa, which showed Africans as savage or comic. He decided someone needed to tell the story from the other side.

Things Fall Apart (1958) is the story of Okonkwo, a proud and fearful man, a famous wrestler and a great farmer in the village of Umuofia at the end of the nineteenth century, whose world comes apart when British missionaries and colonial officials arrive. Achebe wrote in English, but an English shaped by Igbo proverbs and rhythms, and he showed a society of real complexity, with its own law, religion, poetry and politics, before the Europeans came.

The book nearly never appeared. Achebe sent his only handwritten copy to a typing agency in London, which took his money and then ignored it for months. A colleague of his who happened to be traveling to London went to the agency in person and got it typed. Then Heinemann published it, after one of its readers reported that it was the best novel he had read since the war.

It became one of the most widely read novels ever written by an African writer, translated into more than fifty languages. Achebe went on to found and edit Heinemann’s African Writers Series, which brought dozens of African authors to readers around the world. His 1975 lecture arguing that Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was a racist book started an argument that continues today.

During the Nigerian civil war of 1967–70, he served the breakaway state of Biafra as a diplomat. In 1990 a car accident left him paralyzed from the waist down, and he spent his last two decades teaching in the United States. He twice refused a national honor from Nigeria’s government, in protest at its corruption. He died in 2013. The title of his first novel comes from Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”