SOURCE: "Oscar Micheaux: A Black Pioneer," in South Dakota Review, Vol. 11, No. 4, Winter, 1973-74, pp. 62-9.

In the following essay, Hebert discusses Micheaux's novels as socio-historical artifacts that offer unique glimpses of South Dakotan life during the times in which the works were written.

During the spring of 1905, a unique homesteader appeared in Gregory County, South Dakota who became the object of much attention and gossip, for as the homesteader himself claimed, he, Oscar Micheaux, "was the only colored man engaged in agriculture … from Megory [Gregory] to Omaha, a distance of three hundred miles." Today, attention is again being directed toward Micheaux, not only because he was a black homesteader, but because he recorded his South Dakota experiences in two novels, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer published in 1913 and The Homesteader published in 1917.

Most of what is known about Micheaux's background and his experiences in...