Biography
Oscar Micheaux was an American author, film director and independent producer. Born in Metropolis, Illinois, he wrote and self-published several novels drawing on his experiences as a homesteader before entering film. His first feature, The Homesteader (1919), was followed by Within Our Gates (1920), which he wrote, directed and produced.
Over three decades he made more than forty films, both silent and sound, aimed primarily at African-American audiences and distributed through the "race film" circuit. He is regarded as the first major African-American feature filmmaker and the most successful of the first half of the twentieth century.
