7 Fascinating Facts About Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’

Things Fall Apart (1958) has been called “the finest novel written about life in Nigeria at the end of the 19th century” and “a classic of world literature.” The book describes the oppression of the Ibo (now called Igbo) people in Nigeria by British colonial administrators and follows the life of Okonkwo, an Igbo leader and wrestling champion. Here’s what you need to know about Chinua Achebe’s debut novel. 

1. The title comes from a famous poem.
2. Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to fill “a gap in the bookshelf.”
3. The novel was partly a response to books like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 
4. The manuscript was nearly lost.
5. Initially, Things Fall Apart had a very small print run.
6. Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than 50 languages.
7. The novel resonates with people all over the world.

The title comes from a famous poem.

Chinua Achebe nabbed the title for his novel from the first verse of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”         

Achebe told The Paris Review in 1994 that Yeats was one of his favorite poets, but that he “wouldn’t make too much of that” because “I was showing off more than anything else. As I told you, I took a general degree, with English as part of it, and you had to show some evidence of that. … It was only later I discovered his theory of circles or cycles of civilization. I wasn’t thinking of that at all when it came time to find a title. That phrase ‘things fall apart’ seemed to me just right and appropriate.” 

Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to fill “a gap in the bookshelf.”

In 2008, 50 years after publishing his debut novel, Achebe explained to PBS News Hour that he wrote Things Fall Apart because “something needed to be done.” He’d had an English education and had read plenty of English literature, so “I was already familiar with stories of different people …. at some point, I began to miss my own,” he said. “Think of it in terms of a gap in the bookshelf, you know, where a book has been taken out and the gap is there.” He set the story at a point where white Christian missionaries are coming to what’s now Nigeria because “I wanted that moment of change, in which one culture was in contact, in conflict, in conversation with another culture, and something was going to happen.” It may have been a nod to his own history: Achebe’s parents converted to Christianity and became missionaries. 

The novel was partly a response to books like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 

One of Achebe’s goals with Things Fall Apart was to present a different picture of Africa—of a vibrant place with thriving culture—than had previously been painted in literature by European writers. Most famous is Achebe’s criticism of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 book Heart of Darkness. “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality,” Achebe wrote in the essay “An Image of Africa,” in which he declared Conrad “a thoroughgoing racist” [PDF].

“If you don’t like someone’s story, you write your own,” Achebe told The Paris Review. “If you don’t like what somebody says, you say what it is you don’t like.” He explained that he wasn’t saying people shouldn’t read Conrad—in fact, he himself taught a course on Heart of Darkness. “What I’m saying is, Look at the way this man handles Africans. Do you recognize humanity there?” 

The manuscript was nearly lost.

In 1957, Achebe was studying at the BBC in London when he showed his manuscript for Things Fall Apart to Gilbert Phelps, an instructor at his school. Phelps wanted to give the book to his publishers, but Achebe still had revisions to make, so he took the manuscript back to Nigeria, and made the edits.

What he did next could have had dire consequences. He sent his handwritten manuscript, the only copy of Things Fall Apart in existence, to a London typing agency in the mail.

Thankfully, the manuscript made it to London. The agency responded that they’d received his manuscript and requested a payment of thirty-two pounds for two copies, which Achebe sent. And then he waited … and waited … and waited. For months.

Achebe wrote to the agency repeatedly, but got no answer. “I was getting thinner and thinner and thinner,” he recalled. Eventually, his boss, who was heading back to London for vacation, went to the agency, demanded they find and type the book, and send it back, which they did—but only one copy, not the two Achebe had paid for. And he never got an explanation for what had happened.

Initially, Things Fall Apart had a very small print run.

Things Fall Apart was bought by Heinemann, which initially printed a very small number of copies of the book. The publisher was taking a risk—as Achebe told The Paris Review, “They had no idea if anybody would want to read it.” Things Fall Apart quickly went out of print, and according to Achebe, it wouldn’t have graced shelves again if for not for Alan Hill, who decided to take a gamble and put out a paperback edition. That gamble paid off. 

Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than 50 languages.

In the years since its publication, Things Fall Apart has sold more than 20 million copies and has been translated into 57 different languages, and it remains one of the most taught and dissected novels about Africa. “It would be impossible to say how Things Fall Apart influenced African writing,” scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote. “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.” Achebe followed Things Fall Apart with No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964); the three books comprise what’s now known as The African Trilogy. 

The novel resonates with people all over the world.

“The popularity of Things Fall Apart in my own society can be explained simply, because my people are seeing themselves virtually for the first time in the story,” Achebe said in 1991. “This was the first time we were seeing ourselves, as autonomous individuals, rather than half-people, or as Conrad would say, ‘rudimentary souls.’ We are not rudimentary at all, we are full-fledged souls.”

But it’s not just Africans who are moved by the novel. In his essay “Teaching Things Fall Apart,” Achebe (a professor who never taught the novel himself) wrote that it resonated with everyone from South Korean English students, who saw “a parallel between the colonization of the Igbo people by the British in the 19th century and that of their own country by Japan in the 20th,” to a white kid from the University of Massachusetts, who told him, “That Okonkwo is like my father.” (No less than James Baldwin felt similarly: The Giovanni’s Room author said in 1980, “When I read Things Fall Apart in Paris ... the Ibo tribe in Nigeria... a tribe I never saw; a system, to put it that way, or a society the rules of which were a mystery to me ... I recognized everybody in it. That book was about my father ... How he got over I don’t know but he did.”)

“I suspect,” Achebe told PBS News Hour, “that {readers} find something in this book which resonates with their own history, people in different places … there must be things that are universal in the human story which one can use, one can hit upon in telling your own peculiar story.”

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