OSCAR MICHEAUX: The Great and Only: The Life of America's First Black Filmmaker. By Patrick McGilligan. Harper Perennial. 432 pages. $16.95

During a time when Jim Crow laws kept theaters segregated and D.W. Griffith received plaudits for glorifying the Ku Klux Klan in "The Birth of a Nation," Oscar Micheaux made long-form movies with black actors for black audiences. In doing so, he rebutted Griffith and forged his own path with pictures that took up challenging issues -- but which generally featured happy endings.

And -- for a while in the 1920s -- he based his national headquarters in the heart of Roanoke.

Patrick McGilligan's biography of Micheaux is comprehensive and engaging. He tracks the filmmaker's early life as a South Dakota homesteader and looks at how Micheaux wove his life experiences into his films. He uses interviews, publicity materials and newspaper accounts to track Micheaux's good and bad times -- the latter including some dodgy behavior that enabled him to bypass censors and keep his movies financed.

The "Harlem and Roanoke" chapter is smack in the middle of the book, but the crisp prose will keep readers enthralled at the sections that run both before and after it.

-- Mason Adams is a reporter for The Roanoke Times.