Nigerian novelist, essayist, and critic — the founding figure of modern anglophone African literature and, by common acknowledgment, the writer who made African fiction a serious presence in the global literary tradition on its own terms rather than as exotic supplement. Things Fall Apart (1958), written while Achebe was in his late twenties working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, tells the story of Okonkwo, an Igbo wrestler and warrior whose world is destroyed by the arrival of British missionaries and colonial administration in the 1890s. The book has sold more than twenty million copies, been translated into sixty-plus languages, and is read in African schools and American undergraduate courses with about equal frequency — the closest thing to a canonical African novel in English.
Achebe's central literary-political move is to render Igbo society — its proverbs, its councils of elders, its religion, its internal quarrels — as a fully human culture with its own moral complexity, rather than as the "darkness" against which European civilization is the light. The stakes of this move are argued most famously in his 1975 lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," which opened a critical reassessment of Conrad that has shaped postcolonial studies ever since. His four-novel sequence (Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966)) traces Igbo history from first colonial contact through early postcolonial Nigerian political disillusion. A Man of the People's final pages, predicting a military coup, were published in the same week the first Nigerian coup occurred — after which Achebe lived much of the rest of his life in exile.
Anthills of the Savannah (1987) was his return to the novel after two decades. His essays — collected in Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975), Hopes and Impediments (1988), and the late The Education of a British-Protected Child (2009) — are among the major documents of 20th-century African intellectual life. There Was a Country (2012), his last book, is his long-delayed memoir of the Biafran civil war (1967–70), in which he served as the Biafran republic's ambassador-at-large and which reshaped the rest of his thinking about Nigeria and the African postcolonial state.