Overview

"Oscar Micheaux was the Jackie Robinson of film, the black D. W. Griffith-a bigger-than-life American folk hero whose important life story has been nearly forgotten today. The son of freed slaves, he roamed America as a Pullman porter before making his first mark as a homesteader in South Dakota-and going on from there to become the king of the ""race cinema"" industry, producing and/or directing nearly forty films during a time of Jim Crow segregation when African-American artists were not welcome in Hollywood. In this groundbreaking new biography, award-winning film historian Patrick McGilligan offers a vivid and fascinating portrait of a true pioneer of American culture who was equal parts visionary, hustler, huckster, innovator, and raffish Barnum-like showman-and the first great African-American filmmaker."

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9780060731403

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Reviews

McGilligan has made this incredible, half-forgotten life newly available to us all. -- The Guardian

In the skilled hands of Patrick McGilligan, Oscar Micheaux s life story bristles and takes flight. --Pearl Bowser, author of Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences

Author Information

Patrick McGilligan is the author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light; Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; and George Cukor: A Double Life; and books on the lives of directors Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, and Oscar Micheaux, and actors James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. He also edited the acclaimed five-volume Backstory series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters and (with Paul Buhle), the definitive Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from Kenosha, where Orson Welles was born.

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