Chinua Achebe's Literary Influence

Chinua Achebe’s influence on the literary world started with the publication of his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which creatively infused the English language with the author’s mother tongue to offer a nuanced portrayal of traditional Igbo culture and its disruption by the colonizer. This novel, along with Achebe’s entire oeuvre, has inspired and emboldened generations of African and diasporic authors, from Toni Morrison to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This chapter retraces the story of this influence. The first section examines writers’ and critics’ responses to Achebe’s works, so as to circumscribe the extent and nature of his legacy. The second part engages more directly with literary responses to Achebe’s fiction and non-fiction. It is shown how the impact of these texts ranges from faint echoes that discreetly index Achebe’s influence to sustained intertextual engagements that meaningfully complement or probe the writer’s insights into issues such as culture, history, and gender.