with middle-class aspirations who goes to the untamed country, falls in love with a young white woman, and has an imperial dream of conquering the wilderness. Because of the laws against miscegenation, he marries instead a young black woman. Unable to succeed initially, he cultivates contempt for urban blacks or those bad blacks whose chicanery interferes with his own conquests. The protagonist loses his first wife, but is able eventually to marry his "dream girl;" he is finally trium- phant. Professor Young notes that Micheaux retells this story in six of his seven novels and that his plots are also based upon a manipulation of his own life experiences to fit his thesis. Young maintains that his protagonists are not alter egos or reflections of a complex and fragmented psyche, but they are examples of how Micheaux would have us evaluate him. ¹

Oscar Micheaux was first and foremost a film director. He produced, directed, and wrote some forty-three films--twenty- seven silent and sixteen sound features. ^* Most of them have been lost. His last known film activity was writing and directing The Betrayal in 1948, which was adapted from his novel The Wind from Nowhere. Micheaux was the first African-American to produce a feature-length film and therefore bears the burden of being the black pioneer of American film (a prestigious an- nual film award, given by the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame to black artists and filmmakers, also bears his name). In both the print and film mediums, his characters were generally involved in the personal and financial struggles of the black middle class or "wanabees" (recent arrivals from the rural South) living in urban ghettoes and on the American Great Plains, eager to make their mark in the world, just as Micheaux was.

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