The title of one of Africa's most translated novels comes from an Irish poet.

1919 · 1958 · apart: 39 years

Chinua Achebe took Things Fall Apart (1958) from a line of W. B. Yeats's 1919 poem 'The Second Coming'.

◍ Show on the globe

The event

• Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart1958 · Lagos, Nigeria. In 1958 Chinua Achebe, a 27-year-old at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, published a novel about Okonkwo, a proud Igbo strongman whose world collapses with the arrival of missionaries and British rule. He took the title from a poem by Yeats. The book has sold more than 20 million copies in dozens of languages and became the starting point of modern African literature.

20th century

More amazing facts

• 1918 The Spanish flu did not come from Spain.
• 1918 · 2012 The last veteran of World War I died in 2012, the year the Higgs boson was found.
• 1918 A pigeon was awarded France’s Croix de Guerre.
• 1919 Boston was flooded with molasses the day before the US adopted Prohibition.
• 1919 · 1939 The creator of the Ilya Muromets went on to give the world the helicopter.
• 1919 · 1921 Einstein signed over his Nobel Prize before he had won it. Under their 1919 divorce settlement, the money from a future prize was to go to Mileva Marić, and she did get it.

All amazing facts (1058) →