a_raisin_in_the_sun_-_lorraine_hansberry

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LORRAINE HANSBERRY touched the taproots of American life
as only a very few playwrights ever can in A Raisin in the
Sun, the play that made her in 1959, at 29, the youngest
American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to
win the Best Play of the Year Award of the New York
Drama Critics. In Raisin, wrote James Baldwin, “never
before in the entire history of the American theater had so
much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the
stage.” Published and produced worldwide in over thirty
languages and in thousands of productions nationally, the
play “changed American theater forever” and became an
American classic, as The New York Times summarized
recently. In 1961, Hansberry’s film adaptation of the play
won a Cannes Festival Award and was nominated Best
Screenplay; in the 1970s it was adapted into a Tony Award
—winning musical; and in the 1980s a major resurgence
began with revivals at a dozen regional theaters and the
1989 American Playhouse production for television of the
complete play, unabridged for the first time.

On January 12, 1965, during the run of her second play,
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, cancer claimed
Lorraine Hansberry. She was 34. “Her creative literary
ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues
confronting the world today,” predicted Martin Luther King,
Jr., on her death, “will remain an inspiration to generations
yet unborn.” These words have proved prophetic as more
and more of her work has become known.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a portrait of Hansberry
in her own words, was the longest-running off-Broadway
drama of 1969; it has been staged in every state of the

Union, recorded, filmed, televised, and expanded into the
widely read “informal autobiography” of the same title (not
to be confused with the play), while the title itself (from her
last speech) has entered the language. Les Blancs (The
Whites), her drama of revolution in Africa, presented
posthumously on Broadway, received the votes of six critics
for Best American Play of 1970 and, since its acclaimed
revival at the Arena Stage in 1988, has begun a
resurgence of its own with productions planned at many
regional theaters.

In her plays Hansberry illuminated the extraordinary lives
and aspirations of “ordinary” people—black and white,
American, African, and European—confronting the most
fundamental challenges and choices of the century. Her
published works include the above-mentioned plays, To Be
Young, Gifted and Black: An Informal Autobiography , and
Lorraine Hansberry: The Collected Last Plays and The
Movement, a photohistory of the Civil Rights struggle.
Excerpts from her speeches and interviews are recorded in
the Caedmon album Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: Art
and the Black Revolution.

ALSO BY

Lorraine Hansberry

LES BLANCS
The Collected Last Plays

“Hansberry, like the great Bernard Shaw, knew how to
make provocative characters become real people on the
stage … representing a variety of viewpoints on a subject
of overwhelming importance.”

—NewYork Daily News

Les Blancs is a drama of Shakespearean grandeur set in
the shifting moral terrain of late-colonial Africa, where her
anguished hero must choose between two different kinds of
loyalty and two fatally opposing codes of conduct. The
Drinking Gourd traces the strangled interdependence of
slaves, slave owners, and overseers. And What Use Are
Flowers? is a whimsical yet deadly serious fantasy about
the aftermath of a nuclear conflagration.

“Somewhere, past performance, staging and written
speech, resides [the] brilliant anguished consciousness of
Lorraine Hansberry.”

—The NewYork Times

Drama/African-American Studies

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