It’s the birthday of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe (1930-2013, #nicelonglifebutmaybenotlongenough), who began writing about Africa after becoming disillusioned in college about the novels that white authors were writing about Africa. His best-known novel is Things Fall Apart (1958), about the devastating effects of British colonialism on tribal Africa. The novel has been translated into 45 languages and was chosen by Encyclopaedia Brittanica for its list, “12 Novels Considered the ‘Greatest Book Ever Written.’”

(Guess what else is on that list. Go ahead, guess.)

Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, went to schools built on the British model, and studied all the great authors of Western literature at the University College of Ibadan, but came to believe that such literature was “holding the continent captive.” (He especially despised Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.) After college, Achebe worked for the BBC in London and wrote Things Fall Apart. He mailed the manuscript, which had been written in longhand, to a typing service, which lost the manuscript for some months; fortunately, it was eventually found and later published by someone discerning at Heinemann.

Achebe’s second novel, No Longer at Ease, was a sequel to the first and came out in 1960; his third, Arrow of God, came out in 1964. By now Achebe was a director at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in Lagos, Nigeria. The Nigerian civil war for Biafran independence in the late 1960s was a devastating experience and eventually drove Achebe and his wife, two sons, and two daughters to flee to Britain. While he returned to Nigeria after the war and taught at the University of Nigeria from 1976 to 1981, he did not write another novel for 20 years.

In 1988, his novel Anthills of the Savannah finally came out to great acclaim. Soon after, Achebe was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. After treatment in London, he moved to the U.S. and taught at Bard College, then Brown University. In a 1991 interview with Conjunctions magazine, Achebe spoke of his accident: “Children are born deformed. What crime did they commit? I’ve been very lucky. I walked for 60 years. So what does it matter that I can’t for my last few years. There are people who never walked at all.”

(On a completely unrelated note, it occurs to me that maybe I should stop complaining about having to see a podiatrist this morning.)

Achebe’s influence on African literature has been likened to that of Shakespeare’s influence on English lit.

Enjoy this Friday full to the brim with heavy wet snow and stay scrupulously honest to the data.