Oscar Micheaux: "The Czar of Black Hollywood"
Oscar Micheaux was the quintessential self-made man. Novelist, film-maker and relentless self-promoter, Micheaux was born on a farm near Murphysboro, Illinois.
He worked briefly as a Pullman porter and then in 1904 homesteaded nearly 500 acres of land near the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
Micheaux published novels in Nebraska and New York and made movies in Chicago and Los Angeles. Micheaux left “autobiographical” records in his first three novels, The Conquest (1913), The Forged Note (1915) and The Homesteader (1917), in which his protagonists play out a young black man’s life in rural, white South Dakota.
Micheaux began his career with door-to-door sales of his early writings to neighboring farmers.
Encouraged by the modest success from his first novel, Micheaux gave up farming to write six other novels about this period and region. Read More
