How much of the story of Jean Baptiste is a work of the author's own imagination and how much comes from an authentic source we do not consider it necessary to say. But that he has in this instance drawn more largely and directly from fact than is the practice of the novelist is admitted, and we have his consent therefore, to make certain statements concerning himself that relate to the story, and why he has written it.

To begin with, that which any writer has been more closely associated with, are the things he can best portray. Wherefore, in "THE HOMESTEADER," Oscar Micheaux has written largely along the lines he has lived, and, naturally of what he best knows. His experience has been somewhat unusual; his association largely out of the ordinary. Born thirty-three years ago in Southern Illinois, he left those parts at an early age to come into his larger education in the years that followed through extensive traveling and a varied association. Purchasing a relinquishment on a homestead in South Dakota at the age of twenty; five years later he had succeeded and owned considerable lands in the country wherein he had settled. Always literarily inclined he wrote articles for newspapers and magazines as a beginner, and then during his twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh years occurred the conflicting incident that changed the whole course of his life, and gave him more than anything else, the subsequent material for the building of this story.

Shortly after this his first book appeared, and he at last had found his calling. He wrote his second book two years later. But the episode that had changed his life from ranching to writing was ever in his mind and always so forcibly until he was never a contented man until he had written it—and "The Homesteader" is the story.