Chinua Achebe Publishes Things Fall Apart

On 17 June 1958, the London publishing house William Heinemann released a hardback novel titled Things Fall Apart by a young Nigerian radio producer named Chinua Achebe. Printed in an initial run of around 2,000 copies, the book took its title from W. B. Yeats's 1919 poem "The Second Coming" and depicted nineteenth-century colonial disruption in an Igbo community. The release immediately drew praise from British literary critics, marking a turning point in how African societies were portrayed in worldwide English-language literature.

Achebe began drafting the text while employed at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in Lagos, having previously taught school in Oba after graduating from the University of Ibadan in 1953. He chose to compose the work in English rather than the standardized written Igbo of the time, which he regarded as an artificial and stilted union of separate dialects. In 1957, Achebe substantially restructured his manuscript, excising the second and third sections of an expansive multi-generational narrative to focus exclusively on the tragic downfall of a single protagonist, Okonkwo.