Achebe: The Man and His Works uses the critical essay format to assess Chinua Achebe as a person, a writer and the inaugurator of the literary tradition of cultural nationalism.  It progressively and thematically analyses his novels and works, comparing them with those of African literary and cultural groundbreakers in the Diaspora, including the pioneering works of Olaudah Equiano and Zora Neale Hurston

 

The book is a unique and fresh addition to the body of writings on Africa’s most respected novelist, widely acclaimed as the father of modern African literature, and generally believed to be one of the 100 most important writers of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. A must read!

Dr. Rose Ure Mezu was born in Nigeria and studied in Port-Harcourt, (Nigeria), Abidjan, (Côte d’Ivoire ), Buffalo (New York) and Paris (France) where she graduated with a Diplôme d’Études  from the Sorbonne. She obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1993, specializing in Francophone and Anglo-phone Feminist Literature. She had been a Commissioner of Social Welfare in Imo State, Nigeria, and is currently an Associate Professor of English, Women Studies and Comparative Literature at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.  She is also the founder and Co-ordinator of WADS: Black Creativity & the State of the Race, which organizes international and interdisciplinary conferences on Africa and the Diaspora.

 

A widely published scholar, her books include Women in Chains: Abandonment in Love Relationships in the Fiction of Selected West African Writers (1994), Songs of the Hearth (1993), Homage to my People (2004), A History of Africana Women’s Literature (2004), and with Dr S. Okechukwu Mezu, Black Nationalists: Reconsidering Du Bois, Garvey, Booker T. & Nkrumah (1999).