Things Fall Into Place

This decision proved crucial.

The expanded opening section became the first two-thirds of the published book. In it, the protagonist, Okonkwo, strives to attain a position of respect and power in his home town. His story pulls the reader, as only a compelling narrative can, deep into the intricate web of Igbo political, social, economic and religious beliefs. As a result, when the colonizers finally show up -- tearing the Igbo world apart -- even non-African readers can see what has been lost.

As Okonkwo's friend Obierika explains, the white man "has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."

Achebe would end up cutting the second- and third-generation parts of his original draft entirely. But before "Things Fall Apart" could be published came a near-disaster so frightening that Achebe can scarcely believe he emerged whole.

Ready to submit his revised manuscript, he realized that it needed to be typed first. Foolishly, he mailed his only copy, along with a sizable payment, to a company in England to have this done.

Months went by. Letters of inquiry went unanswered.

"I lost a lot of weight," he says.

Finally his boss at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corp., a no-nonsense Englishwoman heading home on leave, volunteered to investigate. For years afterward, Achebe's British editor, Alan Hill, dined out on the story of how the manuscript, inadvertently mislaid, had been found "lying in the corner, gathering dust."

Achebe admired Hill, so he let the editor tell the story his way. But he uses it now to highlight the different perspectives of colonizer and colonized. Because the woman who got the typing firm to cough up his manuscript, he says, told him nothing about dusty corners or innocent mistakes.

Those details were invented, Achebe believes, by a man who couldn't grasp the possibility that a British company might have deliberately set out to cheat an African.

'Okonkwo Was Well Known'

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the center cannot hold . . ."

Colum McCann, one of the writers invited to speak at the Town Hall celebration -- put together by PEN American Center, Bard and Achebe's American publisher -- is reciting William Butler Yeats. As a student, Achebe read and loved the Irish poet, and he took his novel's title from "The Second Coming."