Recalling his days at the University of Ibadan, he narrates his experience of encountering Professor James Welch. He particularly liked these words of his professor – ‘We may not be able to teach you what you need or what you want. We can only teach you what we know’. Chinua Achebe liked that quote and he still regards those words as the best education that he received from the University. It made him decide on a course of action – ‘He has to go out on his own’. He was a bit critical about the way the Department of English treated his short story which was forwarded to the department as part of a competition. No awards were given to the competition citing the lack of quality of the submitted short stories. Chinua Achebe received a mention about his short story in the competition. Later on, when Chinua Achebe quizzed the lecturer who had organized the prize, she said that there was nothing wrong with the short story.
Achebe describes W.B Yeats as the ‘Wild Irishman’ He liked Yeats’s ‘love for the language, his flow’. Achebe is also a big fan of T.S Eliot whom he describes as someone who has ‘a priestly erudition’. He borrowed the titles of ‘Things Fall Apart’ and ‘No Longer at Ease’ from W.B Yeats and T.S Eliot respectively.
Describing the hurdles, he had to encounter to publish ‘Things Fall Apart’ Achebe says that the publisher Heinemann received a report which contained 7 words. The seven words were – ‘The best first novel since the war’. That was the first time that the publishers were seeing an African novel.
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