Chinua Achebe, the "Father of African literature" and author of the acclaimed 1958 classic Things Fall Apart, has died following a brief illness, his agent Andrew Wylie reports. The beloved novelist was one of the first African writers to receive global critical praise, in part for demystifying the African experience, as well as for raising the quality of dialogue concerning the continent's raw history. Dayo Olopade in The New Republic called Achebe a "poet-politician" in reference to his pseudo-memoir There Was a Country, a brutal retelling of the Biafra civil war, and a "book [that] reads like an affidavit cloaked as personal memoir.” The Nigerian-born writer -- who also had been a Professor at Brown College since 2009 -- has written over twenty books, and his influence knows no bounds.

To Nigerians, he was a philosopher-king, awarded the Nigerian National Merit Award, the highest intellectual honor bestowed in Nigeria. To Africans, he was a bridge-builder and perhaps above all else a craftsman, weaving the intricacies of the past -- colonization and decolonization, the various forms of identity and nationalism -- into a patchwork of understanding for the rest of the world. And, of course, to the world, he was an educator, a frontiersman on the boundaries of what was possible for fiction and for creative growth.

Though the bulk of his work is fiction, buried deep within the author's pages are all sorts of proud African voices resounding through the foothills of Kenya to the valleys of the Niger river, booming from the belly of a very real African diaspora. Things Fall Apart is, in many ways, an antidote to the perception of Africa as molded by Joseph Conrad, author of the "The Heart of Darkness," and whom Achebe famously called "a bloody racist" for reducing Africa to little more than brute barbarism. His seminal work continues to be studied in far-flung corners of the world, has been translated into more than fifty languages, and has sold over eight million copies to date.

As explained by the African scholar Kwame Anthony, "It would be impossible to say how 'Things Fall Apart' influenced African writing. It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians. Achebe didn't only play the game, he invented it." And so he'll be remembered, not just as an author or an educator, but as an inventor, an architect of hope of the highest order.