[AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY & LITERATURE] "BY THE PIONEER" [pseud Oscar Micheaux]

The Conquest. The Story of a Negro Pioneer

Lincoln, Nebraska: The Woodbine Press, (1913). First Edition. First printing (reputedly 1,000 copies). In the deep blue binding variant. Octavo (20cm). Publisher's blue cloth-covered boards, titled in white on spine and front cover; [8],9-311pp; frontispiece portrait and 15 unnumbered leaves of photographic plates (halftones). A complete, clean and sound copy with moderate external wear; board corners and spine ends rubbed; spine slightly darkened, with spine lettering dull, some flaking to lettering on front cover. Internally quite good, with all plates present, text clean, tight and unmarked. A complete, sound, Good or better copy.

Micheaux's uncommon first book and the source for his 1919 silent film "The Homesteader," an autobiographical novel based on his own years spent homesteading in rural South Dakota. The novel's main character, "Oscar Devereaux," faces all the hardships of any early 20th-century sod-buster while also dealling with the isolation and prejudice that come with being the sole African-American homesteader in his section. Drawing on his own experience, Micheaux addresses these difficulties candidly, including a frank discursion on the temptations of miscegenation (to which Micheaux is clearly opposed): "I had learned that throughout these Dakotas and Nebraska, that other lone colored men who had drifted from the haunts and homes of the race...and had with time and natural development, through the increase in the valuation of their homesteads or other lands they had acquired, grown prosperous and had finally, with hardly an exception, married into the white race... These people had no doubt been honorable and had intended to remain loyal to their race, but long, hard years, lean crops, and the long, lonesome days had changed them..." In the course of the novel, Devereaux's marriage, to a Black minister's daughter from Chicago, dissolves unhappily; the homestead fails, a victim of drought, flood, and harsh winter – all echoing Micheaux's own unhappy tenure on the prairie.

Having failed as a farmer, Micheaux would go on to a storied career as an author and filmmaker. By the time of his death in 1951, he had published seven novels and directed or produced more than forty films, all featuring primarily or entirely Black casts. But because Micheaux was never in the mainstream of African-American intellectual life, and had very little intersection with the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, his novels were long unappreciated and practically forgotten until The Conquest, his first novel, was brought back into print in 1994 by the University of Nebraska Press. But in the intervening 80 years of obscurity most original copies had disappeared, making the first printing quite elusive. BLOCKSON 2640. Missed by Hanna.

Price: $1,250.00

Go Back