He was eight when he began to learn English and fourteen when he went, as one of the few boys selected, to the Government College at Umuahia, one of the best schools in West Africa. He enrolled in 1948 at University College, Ibadan, as a member of the first class to attend this new school. He intended to study medicine but soon switched to English literary studies and followed a syllabus that almost exactly resembled the University of London honors degree program, Ibadan's college being then a constituent college of the University of London. He contributed stories, essays, and sketches to the
University Herald. (The stories were published in 1972 in
Girls at War and Other Stories.) After graduating in 1953 he firmly decided to be a writer. Achebe is a master of the craft of fiction; he has extended the capability of English beyond the limits it had achieved to the point when he published his first novel. His control of language is absolute, and his wide range of usage is appropriate to the multiplicity of his interests.
Things Fall Apart first received attention, however, because of the social purposes he assigned to it and to himself as writer.
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