SOURCE: "Negro Fiction to World War I," in Negro Voices in American Fiction, The University of North Carolina Press, 1948, pp. 23-100.

In the following excerpt, Gloster briefly assesses The Conquest, The Homesteader, and The Forged Note.

Avoiding both pride and bitterness in his treatment of interracial subject matter, Oscar Micheaux writes some-what autobiographically of the experiences of an enterprising Negro in Chicago, the South Dakota farm lands, and the urban South. His first novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), based largely on the author's own life and dedicated to Booker T. Washington, relates the experiences of Oscar Devereux in Illinois and South Dakota. In the latter state Devereux, after acquiring a homestead and becoming a prosperous farmer, falls in love with a Scottish girl but evades matrimony because of the racial barrier. Later marrying Orlean McCraline, daughter of a Negro preacher of Chicago, he finally...