Kindred Spirits

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe-author of Things Fall Apart, one of the towering works of twentieth-century fictionis considered the father of modern African literature. The equally revered Toni Morrison, author of masterworks such as Beloved and one of only four Americans to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in the past half-century, acknowledged African literatures and Achebes influence on her own work. Until now, however, there has been no book that focuses on and critically explores the rich connections between these two writers. In Kindred Spirits, Christopher Okonkwo offers the first comparative study of Morrison and Achebe. Surveying both writers oeuvres, Okonkwo examines significant relations between Achebes and Morrisons personal backgrounds, career histories, artistic visions, and life philosophies, finding in them striking parallels. He then pairs a trilogy of novels by each author: Achebes Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God and Morrisons Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Okonkwo closely analyzes these two sequences-through what he theorizes as "villagism"-as century-spanning village literature that looks to the local to reveal the universal.