Chinua Achebe is Africa's most widely read novelist and the first to be taken seriously by both African and European readers. His novels and critical pronouncements have profoundly influenced his readers' understanding of Africans and their lives and have formed the basis for many a discussion of ‘the African novel’. They have also provided a model for succeeding African novelists to follow and contend with. Yet, although Achebe's first and most influential novel, Things Fall Apart, was published thirty years ago, critical discussion of his work as a whole has rarely moved beyond books designed as introductions. Three of those books were first written more than fifteen years ago – although they have been revised since to take into account Achebe's short fiction and poetry – and they are concerned chiefly with describing the novels in terms of their central themes, conflicts and characters. The fourth book, Robert M. Wren's Achebe's World, was published in 1980 and provides important historical and anthropological background and annotation for the novels. These four critical works have served and continue to serve a useful purpose for new students of Achebe's writing. The present study seeks to build upon the foundation they have constructed.

That foundation contains some now solidly entrenched concepts and assumptions about the nature of Achebe's achievement, a foundation to which Chinua Achebe's own essays and lectures – notably ‘The Role of the Writer in a New Nation’ and ‘The African Writer and the English Language’ – have contributed much of the framework.