SOURCE: "Oscar Micheaux, Black Novelist and Film Maker," in Vision and Refuge: Essays on the Literature of the Great Plains, edited by Virginia Faulkner, University of Nebraska Press, 1982, pp. 109-25.

In the following essay, Fontenot discusses the history and major themes of Micheaux's most important novels and films.

Oscar Micheaux, who lived from 1884 to 1951, was a black novelist and movie producer who believed that one solution to the problems that plagued black urbanites was for them to abandon the cities and to look to the Great Plains as a place where they could build an alternative society. Similarly, according to Micheaux, black southerners could homestead in what he called the Great Northwest (northern Great Plains) instead of following Booker T. Washington's philosophy of economic and moral betterment and staying in the South. Drawing upon his own experience as a settler on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota from...