The Masquerade. An Historical Novel. by MICHEAUX, Oscar - 1947

Octavo, original gilt-stamped maroon cloth, pictorial endpapers, original dust jacket. 401p. Original burgundy cloth. Pictorial DJ. 22 cm. Jacket has some scuffing and soiling. Closed tear along top of front panel. Corners clipped on jacket flaps but not deeply enough to remove price. In the Acknowledgements, Micheaux credits Charles W. Chesnutt's "House Behind the Cedars" for the "scenario" of "The Masquerade" (which surely understates just how much Micheaux borrowed from Chesnutt's book). First edition of Micheaux's last novel that draws on Charles Chesnutt's House Behind the Cedars (1900) and "calls into question the mechanisms of history itself" with inclusions of "extended passages from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln's first inaugural address [and] the story of John Brown," very scarce in the elusive colorful dust jacket. The son of former slaves, "Micheaux successfully fashioned almost single-handedly… a prototype for African American independent cinema" and upended conventions of the novel (Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 495). His seven novels and nearly 40 films were "innovative in ways that philosophically and politically challenged the contemporary standards" (Green, Reemergence of Oscar Micheaux, 227). Influenced by Booker T. Washington's philosophy, "not of destruction but of construction," Micheaux "wanted to claim for Black people the right to status as the new Adams and Eves… [and] created a textured and layered response to the social crises that circumscribed African American life" (Bowser & Spence, Oscar Micheaux's Symbol of the Unconquered, 81).