Playwright, A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry was a Black activist, artist, public intellectual and writer. When her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, appeared on Broadway in 1959, she became the youngest American playwright, the fifth woman, and the only African American to date to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year. The play was a landmark and made it impossible for the American stage to ignore African American creativity and subject matter thereafter. On January 12, 1965, during the run of her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer. She was 34. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, an autobiographical portrait in her own words adapted by her former husband and literary executor Robert Nemiroff, was posthumously produced in 1969. In 1970, Les Blancs, her play about the inevitability of struggle between colonizers and colonized in Africa and the impending crisis that would surely grow out of it, ran on Broadway to critical acclaim. As if prescient, in the six years Hansberry had between the triumph of her first play and her death, she was extraordinarily prolific. She wrote numerous articles and essays on literary criticism, racism, sexism, homophobia, world peace, and other social and political issues. At her death, she left behind her public and private correspondence, speeches and journals, and various manuscripts in several genres including plays for stage and screen, essays, poetry, and an almost complete novel. Her published writings also include The Drinking Gourd, What Use Are Flowers?, and The Movement. The Lorraine Hansberry Papers are located at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, a division of the NYPL. The official Lorraine Hansberry legacy site is www.lhlt.org.