Micheaux's third novel — an expansion of his first, The Conquest — is autobiography worked into fiction. Jean Baptiste, a Black homesteader farming alone in South Dakota, builds his claim against drought, debt, and loneliness; he falls in love with a white neighbor he believes he cannot marry, and instead marries the daughter of a Chicago minister, a match that collapses under its own strains; ruined and recovered, he turns at last to writing. Micheaux financed and filmed the story himself in 1919 as his first feature, and the novel stands as the seed of a Black independent cinema — the first draft of the career that would make him the most prolific Black filmmaker of his era.
Author: Oscar Micheaux · Original publisher: Western Book Supply Company (Sioux City, Iowa), 1917