Born in 1930, in Ogidi in the state of Anambra, Nigeria, Chinua Achebe is the best known Anglophone African writer. Achebe attended an elite secondary school, Government College, Umuahia, during his highschool years. At 18, he joined the first set of students admitted to Nigeria’s premier university, then called University College, Ibadan. After college, he taught high school for a short while, then joined the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, where he became the executive in charge of foreign services. Since leaving broadcasting, Achebe has been teaching at universities in Nigeria and the United States. He is the founding general editor of the African Writers Series (Heinemann and Greenwood Press) under which, since 1962, the most significant African writing in English and English translation has been published. In 1971, Achebe founded Okike, which has remained a front line African literary journal to the present day. In his own novels, Achebe has portrayed slices of African life, from colonial (Things Fall Apart [1958] and Arrow of God [1964]) to postcolonial times (No Longer at Ease [1960] and A Man of the People [1966]). In the 1970s, he produced short stories (Girls at War and Other Stories [1972]), poetry (Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems [1973]), and essays (Morning Yet on Creation Day [1975]).
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