Oscar Micheaux was a fiercely independent promoter of his own novels and films. He often involved his leading characters in personal and financial struggles for success that mirrored experiences central to his own life. An ardent supporter of the doctrines of Booker T. Washington, who urged that blacks better their own condition through diligence and dedication to practical goals, Micheaux conceived of his work as inspirational as well as entertaining.

Micheaux stands apart from his contemporaries in black letters. In his early books, Micheaux did not write of the rural South, as did Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, nor of northern ghettos, as did James Weldon Johnson. Nor do his early books focus, as did much black fiction of the period, on the tragic results of slavery and the problems resulting from the powerlessness of blacks in American society. His later novels show that he was...