Things Fall Into Place

But this didn't stop young Albert Chinualumogu Achebe from being curious about their beliefs.

He was "anxious about how it all began, what we were doing before the Christians came." He asked questions and soaked up information on Igbo customs and cosmology from overheard conversations. Filling his mental notebook became "the main preparation for my mission, which I didn't know was a mission."

Meanwhile, he applied himself so diligently to his formal education that schoolmates called him "Dictionary." This effort won him admission to a British-run boarding school with an excellent library. There Achebe, who loved the Igbo tales his mother and sister had told him, was entranced by a new kind of story: "Treasure Island," "Gulliver's Travels," "Ivanhoe."

Moving on to the University of Ibadan, he set out to study medicine. This proved a mistake. "I was abandoning the realm of stories," he has explained, "and they would not let me go." He switched to English, history and religion.

The study of English in those days involved no creative writing instruction whatsoever. At one point, however, the department did announce a story competition. Achebe entered. No prize was awarded, but his story was judged a worthy effort.

"I wanted very much to learn what to do," Achebe says, so he sought feedback from the instructor in charge. She said he had violated the short story form. He tried and failed to get her to explain. Finally, she told him she had read his story again and decided there was no form problem after all.

Translation: If he wanted to write, he was on his own.

He graduated in 1953, taught school for a bit, then joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Corp. as a radio producer. By this time, he had dropped his European first name and started to contemplate a novel about the collision of Europe and Africa.

As Achebe first conceived "Things Fall Apart," it was to follow an Igbo family through three generations: the pre-colonial generation the British encountered when they arrived in Nigeria in the late 19th century; the generation that produced the first wave of Christian converts; and his own generation, impatient for the independence that would arrive in 1960.

In 1956, he traveled to England for a BBC training course, bringing the handwritten manuscript of his novel. He showed it to a lecturer who was also a novelist. Impressed, the man offered an introduction to his publisher.

Not yet, Achebe said. It still wasn't what he wanted it to be.

Reading it over, he had realized that "it was too thin." Cramming in three generations meant "leaving out too many things." In particular, he wanted to expand the opening section that shows "the way the people lived" before the colonizers came. He took the manuscript back to Nigeria for more work.