Johnson," which portrayed Africa as a land of grinning, shrieking savages. Time magazine called it "the best novel ever written about Africa."
Achebe was outraged. He vowed that if someone as ignorant as Joyce Cary, the novel's Anglo-Irish author, could write such a book, "perhaps I ought to try my hand at it."
The result was a masterpiece: "Things Fall Apart," his 1958 debut novel, changed the face of world literature by presenting the colonization of Africa from an African point of view. With more than 10 million copies sold in 50 languages, it established Achebe as the patriarch of modern African literature.
Achebe, who has been praised by Nelson Mandela as the writer who "brought Africa to the world," died Friday in Boston after a brief illness. He was 82.
His death was announced by a government spokesman in Achebe's home state of Anambra.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan called him "a cultural icon" and said that his "frank, truthful and fearless interventions in national affairs will be greatly missed at home in Nigeria."
Achebe wrote short stories, essays, poetry and children's books in addition to five novels and edited collections of modern African literature. Awarded the Man Booker prize for his life's work in 2007, he remains best known for "Things Fall Apart," a complex portrait of colonialism's impact on native Nigerian culture.
Set in a group of Igbo villages in the late 19th century, it focuses on Okonkwo, a man whose family embodies the conflicts between traditional ways and the influence of Western missionaries and colonialists. Its simple, declarative opening line still draws comparisons to Hemingway: "Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond."
Achebe wrote the novel in English, which was also a provocation to some critics who said he should have used the Igbo language, but Achebe wanted to speak not only to Africans but to the world beyond.
What he achieved, critics said, was a marvelous invention in which he imbued English with Igbo rhythms, fables and proverbs. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright, hailed "Things Fall Apart" as "the first novel in English which spoke from the interior of an African character rather than … as the white man would see him."
His final book, published last year, was about the Nigerian region of Biafra's unsuccessful war for independence and resulting famine, "There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra."
An ethnic Igbo, Achebe was born Nov. 16, 1930, in Ogidi in southern Nigeria, during an era when missionary influence loomed large and colonialism still held sway.
One of the main preoccupations of the Christian missionaries was to wipe out African culture, which they saw as pagan, superstitious and associated with black magic and witchcraft.
Achebe's parents, Isaiah and Janet, were Protestant converts and had him baptized Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. His name meant "May God Fight On My Behalf." He later dropped his first name.
Although he grew up as a Christian, the ancestral polytheistic faith remained profoundly influential in the community, with many of Achebe's relatives cleaving to their traditions.
At 14 he was accepted into an elite boarding school in southeastern Nigeria, and as a young man he read so much that he was nicknamed "Dictionary." He later won a university scholarship to study medicine.
After a year, he switched to his passion, writing, and studied English, history and theology. That decision was to change his life and the landscape of African literature.
Growing up, he had absorbed Western prejudices so thoroughly that, he later wrote, "I did not see myself as an African to begin with." But in college, it dawned on him that he had given up too much of his identity and could not accept white authors' portrayals of Africans as culturally inferior and subhuman.
In his writings for the student newspaper, he began to find his voice. He started to wonder why his parents converted to Christianity and pondered the conflicts that change brought.
After graduating in 1953 from University College in Ibadan, he worked briefly as a teacher but soon took a job as scriptwriter with the Nigerian Broadcasting Service. He wrote his first novel in his spare time.
