A South Side Chicago family argues over a ten-thousand-dollar insurance cheque and a deposit on a house in a white neighbourhood (1959)
A Raisin in the Sun — the Younger family; the title comes from Langston Hughes's poem 'Harlem'.
Literature · Playwrights
Lorraine Hansberry
1930–1965 · American
African-American drama; the civil rights generation
Lorraine Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway, and at 29 the youngest American and the first Black writer to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. Her 1959 drama about a South Side Chicago family and a house in a white neighbourhood drew on her own father's fight against restrictive covenants. She died of cancer at 34, with only two plays staged in her lifetime.
How to spot them
- ▸The first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway, in March 1959
- ▸Youngest American and first Black dramatist to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award
- ▸Chicago's South Side; her father's Supreme Court case over a restrictive housing covenant
- ▸A title lifted from a Langston Hughes poem about a dream deferred
- ▸Died of pancreatic cancer in January 1965, aged 34
Key works
A disillusioned Greenwich Village intellectual is dragged back into politics by a local reform election campaign (1964)
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window — her only other play staged in her lifetime; it closed the night she died.
A posthumous stage collage of its author's own letters, journals and drafts, whose title a singer turned into a civil rights anthem (1969)
To Be Young, Gifted and Black, assembled by Robert Nemiroff; Nina Simone's song took the title.
An unfinished play set on a mission station in colonial Africa, completed after its author's death and staged on Broadway in 1970 (1970)
Les Blancs.
A 1964 photo-text book on the sit-ins and freedom rides, written for a student civil rights committee (1964)
The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, produced with SNCC.
Her screenplay for the 1961 film of her own Broadway hit, substantially cut by the studio (1961)
The film starred Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Claudia McNeil, reprising their stage roles.
Key ideas
- Housing segregation and restrictive covenants as the practical shape of American racism
- Black assimilation, Pan-Africanism and the return to African identity argued out on stage (Asagai and Beneatha)
- The dream deferred: what a family's aspirations cost each of its members
- Anti-colonialism, and a clear-eyed refusal of both liberal complacency and despair
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Chicago on 19 May 1930; her father Carl Hansberry won the 1940 Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee
- •A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 11 March 1959
- •It was the first Broadway play by a Black woman, and Lloyd Richards was the first Black director on Broadway in decades
- •She was the youngest American, the fifth woman and the first Black writer to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play
- •The title comes from Langston Hughes's poem 'Harlem' — 'does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?'
- •She wrote for Paul Robeson's newspaper Freedom in the early 1950s
- •Married the music publisher Robert Nemiroff, later her literary executor; they divorced in 1964
- •She wrote anonymously to the lesbian magazine The Ladder about her own sexuality
- •Died of pancreatic cancer in New York on 12 January 1965, aged 34
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Sources
- Imani Perry — Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- Lorraine Hansberry, adapted by Robert Nemiroff — To Be Young, Gifted and Black