Things Fall Into Place

"The best literature is connected. We are word-linked," McCann says. "Yeats, Achebe -- their words unravel and remake us."

"One of the first things I loved about Chinua Achebe," Edwidge Danticat tells the roughly 1,500 people in the audience, "was his name. For someone with a name like mine, he feels like family. 'He has an unusual name, too,' I used to tell my high school friends as we read 'Things Fall Apart' in class." Then Danticat reads from Achebe's opening chapter, beginning with its famous first sentence: "Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond."

Chris Abani has a story to tell. As a boy, he was desperate to attract girls the way his elder brother seemed so easily to do. To that end, he copied a florid love letter from a book and offered it to one object of his affection.

"You're a really good writer. Almost as good as your brother," she told him. "You should read the novel he's writing." So Abani sneaked into his brother's room, "and I found a composition notebook full of handwriting and I stole it. And I was captivated from the first sentence: 'Okonkwo was known in all the nine villages . . .' "

The crowd roars.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a story, too. Adichie, who's 30, grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, in a house Achebe and his family had previously occupied. A precocious reader, she absorbed "mostly British children's books in which all the characters were white and ate apples and played in the snow." When she started writing her own stories, also precociously, she used these same apple-eating characters, because "I didn't know that people like me could exist in books."

Then she read "Things Fall Apart."

Shocked and delighted by a book that "so accurately captured my bilingual world," she returned to it again and again. "I was educated in a system that taught me nothing of my pre-colonial past," she says, so Achebe's novel "became strangely personal. It became the life that my great-grandfather had lived."

Later, when she read books that portrayed pre-colonial Africa as "a place of anarchic darkness" and defined today's continent "by what it did not have" -- books that stirred in her "that peculiar African feeling of vulnerability and defensiveness that comes with having to somehow prove your humanity to others" -- Adichie turned once more to "Things Fall Apart."

"It served as a gentle reprimand," she says. "What it said to me was: Don't you dare think that you did not have a complex past."

'I Want to Sort of Scream'

Take Adichie's experience, multiply it many thousands of times, and you can begin to see the effect Achebe's novel had as it began to be read in schools across Africa.

It didn't happen right away. Heinemann, the British firm that published "Things Fall Apart," printed just 2,000 copies, and they stayed in Europe. There was no market for novels in Nigeria in 1958.

Achebe credits Hill, his detail-inventing editor, with helping to change that.

Hill kept the novel in print by republishing it in paperback, a highly unusual strategy in those days. And he made it the first in an unprecedented series of works by African writers, which Achebe helped edit.

Looking back on the explosion of African literature led by "Things Fall Apart," Achebe has cited Amos Tutuola, Cyprian Ekwensi, Mongo Beti and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, among many others, as pioneering peers. But there's no doubt whose book was most influential.

In fact, Achebe's first novel became so iconic that it has overshadowed everything else he has done.

In 1960, he published "No Longer at Ease," using material cut from the original "Things Fall Apart"; it explored his generation's struggle to define its post-independence role. In 1964, "Arrow of God" took readers back into history with the story of a chief priest of the traditional religion and his failed attempt to come to an understanding with the colonizers.

Then came "A Man of the People," with a plot so contemporary it almost got Achebe killed.

The novel centers on a corrupt politician and ends with a military coup. In 1966, just as it was published, a real coup was attempted, and some read Achebe's fictional exercise as a sign that the author -- still working in radio -- had been one of the plotters.

At his Lagos home one morning, Achebe recalls, "I had a call from the broadcasting house." His staff told him that "armed soldiers have just been here looking for you. They said they want to see which is stronger, your pen or their guns." He and his wife, Christie, grabbed their children and went into hiding.

The following year, the eastern region of Nigeria declared itself the Republic of Biafra. A horrific three-year civil war ensued. Achebe found himself traveling abroad to plead the Biafran cause. He also found that, while he could write poetry and short stories in wartime, he couldn't write novels.

After the war, the novel-writing drought continued as Achebe shuttled between academic jobs in Nigeria and the United States. "I don't write something just because it's time," he says by way of explanation. But his homeland's catastrophe may have disoriented him as well.

In 1983 he published "The Trouble With Nigeria," a sharp-edged analysis of how the country had gone wrong since independence. (Short version: Selfish leaders abdicated responsibility for the welfare of ordinary Nigerians.) Writing it may have liberated him to try a novel again.

"Anthills of the Savannah," published in 1987, offers a fictional examination of acute leadership failure. It also features Achebe's strongest female character -- created, some have claimed, in response to feminist criticism of Achebe's first book, whose protagonist beats his wives and generally behaves in an aggressive fashion.

Asked about this, Achebe displays irritation for the only time in a two-hour interview.

"I want to sort of scream that 'Things Fall Apart' is on the side of women," he says. "And that Okonkwo is paying the penalty for his treatment of women; that all his problems, all the things he did wrong, can be seen as offenses against the feminine."

To see Okonkwo beating his wives "as something I have done," he adds, is "not to read fiction."

Achebe's daughter, who teaches "Things Fall Apart" to her African history students at Michigan State, agrees. The character in the novel who comes closest to representing her father's point of view, Nwando Achebe says, is Obierika, who chastises Okonkwo for macho excesses.

So is it true, the writer is asked, that he put some of himself into his portrait of Okonkwo's friend?

"Yes, yes," he says. "I think my daughter's reading is right." But it's important to note, he adds, that as a literary vehicle, Obierika has a fatal flaw.

Which is?

"He is not exciting," Achebe says, laughing. "And that's the trouble with good people in books, isn't it?"

'It Feels Like a Dream'

At Town Hall, the guest of honor appears at last, introduced, to a prolonged standing ovation. "This is an amazing evening for me," he says. "It feels like a dream -- a good dream, the way 'Things Fall Apart' felt 50 years ago."

He thanks Bard's president, Leon Botstein, for offering him a home as he lay paralyzed in a hospital in 1990, uncertain what his future would hold.

He recalls the "heady excitement of creating a language for my own use" as he wrote his masterpiece.

He tells a version of the missing manuscript story. "It nearly killed me," he says. "But there was luck. 'Things Fall Apart' brought me a lot of good luck."

"It's a great, great honor that you've done me," Chinua Achebe says. And now there are shouts and cheers and ululations as the man whose chi made him a great, great writer of the human story prepares to leave the stage.