Achebe is a key figure of English-language postcolonial writing and is often referred to as the “Father of modern African literature.” Born November 16, 1930, in the Igbo (Ibo) region of then Colonial Nigeria, he was a renowned writer of prose, poetry, and critical essays. In many ways, his life reflected the changes that his country was undergoing, such as the impact of British colonial rule on Indigenous languages, cultures, and religions. His father was a teacher and an early convert to Christianity, and variations of this figure appeared throughout Achebe’s writing, including in the short story “Dead Men’s Path.”

Achebe showed early promise as a scholar, and although he originally went to the country’s first university to study medicine, he soon shifted to English literature. As a student, he was troubled by the negative and stereotypical images of Africans he found in European texts, notably Joyce Cary’s 1939 Mr. Johnson, which Achebe deemed a “superficial” look at Nigerian life, and Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness, which Achebe famously rebutted in his 1988 essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” He somewhat controversially chose to write in English, the language of the colonizer, a decision that he believed was necessary to gain the widest reach in multilingual Nigeria.