Achebe, Famed Nigerian Writer, Dies

The first book of Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was nearly lost to history when a London typing service dismissed the handwritten manuscript sent from Africa as a joke.

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Chinua Achebe, Nigerian-born novelist and poet

The joke was on them. Finally published in 1958, "Things Fall Apart" became an improbable success, announcing the Nigerian author, and Africa, on the world's literary stage. It went on to sell more than 10 million copies in 50 languages.

"It literally invented African literature," said Simon Gikandi, Kenyan author of "Reading Chinua Achebe."

Mr. Achebe has died, his literary agent confirmed Friday, following a brief illness. He was 82 years old.

"He was a giant, and a wise and kind man," said a statement by John Makinson, chief executive of the Penguin Group, a unit of Pearson PLC, Mr. Achebe's last publisher.

Born Nov. 16, 1930, in a roadside town in British Nigeria's rural southeast, Mr. Achebe sought work as a young man in Lagos, the colonial capital, where he wrote his first novel: the tragic story of a champion wrestler reduced to suicide by the arrival of Christian missionaries.

Mr. Achebe wrote his early fiction in the 1950s and 1960s at a hopeful time in African history, when waves of independence inspired young writers to celebrate�and perhaps romanticize�the sunnier aspects of life on the continent. Many sought to capture the grandeur of Africa's landscapes�its rivers and gardens.

Mr. Achebe was more wry and more skeptical of Africa's winds of change. In the novels he wrote, African society could be beautiful but brutal, and always in danger of falling apart.

"He started writing at a moment of great expectations, but his works contained this important cautionary note, that things could go wrong," Mr. Gikandi said.

Soon, they did. Mr. Achebe's 1966 novel "Man of the People" ends with a military coup. Weeks after its publication, Nigerians awoke to learn their military had seized power for the first of six times. Civilians and soldiers alike accused the novelist of enjoying foreknowledge of the coup.

Within months, Nigeria was engulfed in independent Africa's first humanitarian catastrophe: a war for the independence of Mr. Achebe's Igbo homeland that left one million people dead, most of them children who starved. The novelist finally delved into this painful period in his final work, released last year, "There Was a Country."

In 1970, after the conflict ended, he drifted from fiction toward criticism and talent-scouting. As editor of a British publishing house Heinemann's African Writer Series, he edited, published and promoted early entrants into Africa's pantheon of writers: Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ghana's Ayi Kwei Armah, Cameroon's Mongo Beti.

A brief foray into politics campaigning for a political party, prompted him to write 1984's "The Trouble With Nigeria," a 68-page rant against everything from taxi drivers to corruption that op-ed writers still quote from liberally. His country�Africa's most populous�looked to him for guidance. At literary seminars in the U.S., Nigerians would pack the seats and exhaust him with questions about their country's politics�to the dismay of non-Nigerians who had come to discuss literature.

In 1975, he accomplished a feat rare even for authors: He knocked a classic, Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," from the literary canon. The 1903 novel had been Europe's most commonly read account of Africa, and bristled with depictions of Africans as half-human cannibals. In an influential series of lectures and essays, Mr. Achebe called the author "a thoroughgoing racist." The charge stuck. Steadily, Mr. Conrad's share of university reading lists fell as Mr. Achebe's rose.

In 1990, a car accident in Lagos left Mr. Achebe paralyzed from the waist down, and sent him to Bard College in New York, an easier setting than Nigeria for a wheelchair-constrained author. In 2009, he joined Brown University in Rhode Island. He would live and lecture in the U.S. for the final decades of his life.

By then, "Things Fall Apart" ranked as one of America's most frequently taught high-school books.

Yet its author played down praise. Twice, he rejected Nigeria's second-highest honor, accusing the leaders who award the prize of trying "to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom."

When critics credited him with transforming American and European views of Africa, he abstained�he thought they hadn't changed all that much.

But he believed they could. In a 1994 interview, he summarized the driving thought behind his art: "If you don't like someone's story, write your own."

—Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg contributed to this article.

Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@dowjones.com