The Igbo response to a century of European novels about Africa. Achebe's terse, proverb-laden prose tells the story of Okonkwo, a Umuofia village leader whose world is undone by his own pride and by the arrival of Christian missionaries. The title is Yeats; everything else is from inside a culture European fiction had only ever observed from the outside. The most-taught African novel in the world.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.