Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist and author of Things Fall Apart, a work that in part led to his being called the “patriarch of the African novel.” Things Fall Apart, which was published in 1953, is considered his magnum opus and is the most widely read book in modern African literature. It went on to sell more than 12 million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. Born in Nigeria in 1930, Chinua Achebe attended the University of Ibadan. Achebe later served as the David and Marianna Fisher University professor and professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. One of Achebe’s famous quotes is: “Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.” He died on March 21, 2013, at age 82, in Boston, Massachusetts.