Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic whose 1958 debut novel _Things Fall Apart_ is recognized as both a worldwide literary classic and a founding work of modern African literature. His chief motivation in writing, as he explained in interviews, was to communicate the experience of colonization and post-colonial life through the eyes of native Africans—both to the rest of the world and to future generations of Africans in need of a better understanding of their past and themselves. This mission placed him in combat with the toxic narratives found in existing literature about Africa—almost all of it written from the perspective of colonists—which blamed the failures of colonization on African people rather than on colonialism itself. Achebe remained a prolific writer and a respected commentator on African culture and politics until his death in 2013.