Lorraine Hansberry

Hansberry, Lorraine (1930–1965), playwright, essayist, poet, and leading literary figure in the civil rights movement. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was twenty-eight years old when her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened on Broadway to instant success. Capturing the spirit of the civil rights movement, this play won the 1959 New York Drama Critics Circle Award and made Hansberry the first black, youngest person, and fifth woman to win that prize. A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by an African American woman produced on Broadway, has become a classic of the American theater and has enjoyed numerous professional revivals.

The roots of Hansberry's artistic vision and activism are in Chicago. Born into a family of substantial means, Hansberry was the youngest of four children—Carl, Jr., Perry, and Mamie. Her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, Sr., was from Gloucester, Mississippi, moved to Chicago after attending Alcorn College, and became known as the “kitchenette king” after subdividing large homes vacated by whites moving to the suburbs and selling these small apartments or kitchenettes to African American migrants from the South. Hansberry's mother, Nannie Perry, a schoolteacher and, later, ward committeewoman, was from Tennessee. At the time of Lorraine's birth, she had become an influential society matron who hosted major cultural and literary figures such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Joe Louis. Although Lorraine and her siblings enjoyed privileges unknown to their working-class schoolmates, the parents infused their children with racial pride and civic responsibility. They founded the Hansberry Foundation, an organization designed to inform African Americans of their civil rights, and encouraged their children to challenge the exclusionary policies of local restaurants and stores.

Carl and Nannie Hansberry challenged restrictive real estate covenants by moving into an all-white neighborhood. A mob of whites gathered in front of the house and threw a brick through the front window, narrowly missing eight-year-old Lorraine and forcing the family to move out. Her father won a narrow victory over restrictive covenants from the Supreme Court, but the decision failed to set precedent on this issue.

Hansberry attended public schools: Betsy Ross Elementary and Englewood High School, where she encountered the children of the working class whose independence and courage she came to admire. Their struggle would become the subject of her first major play. Departing from the family tradition of attending black colleges, Hansberry enrolled at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a predominantly white university, to study journalism, but was equally attracted to the visual arts. She integrated an all-white women's dormitory and became active in the campus chapter of the Young Progressive Association, a national left-wing student organization, serving as its president during her sophomore year. After seeing a moving performance of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, she decided to become a writer and to capture the authentic voice of the African American working class.

Hansberry left Wisconsin after two years and moved to New York City in 1950. She took a job with Freedom, a newspaper founded by Paul Robeson, whose passport had been revoked by the U.S. State Department. She soon became associate editor, working closely with Louis Burnham, who became her mentor. In 1952, she replaced Robeson at a controversial, international peace conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, and subsequently spoke at public rallies and meetings, often critiquing U.S. policy. Hansberry's association with Freedom placed her in the midst of Harlem's rich cultural, artistic, and political life. She read avidly and widely in African American history and culture, politics, philosophy, and the arts, and was especially influenced by the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, William Shakespeare, and Langston Hughes.

While participating in a demonstration at New York University, she met Robert Barron Nemiroff, son of progressive Russian Jewish immigrants, and after a short courtship, married him on 20 June 1953. Having earned his master's degree four months earlier at New York University, he had begun writing a book on Theodore Dreiser, his thesis topic. The young couple moved to Greenwich Village and Hansberry began to write extensively about the people and lifestyles that she observed around her. She was already an experienced writer and editor, having published articles, essays, and poetry in Freedom, New Challenge, and other leftist magazines.

After leaving Freedom in 1953 to concentrate on her writing, Hansberry worked various odd jobs including tagger in the garment industry, typist, program director at Camp Unity (an interracial summer camp), recreation leader for the physically disabled, and teacher at the Marxist-oriented Jefferson School for Social Science. When her husband cowrote “Cindy Oh Cindy” (1956), a ballad that became an instant hit, the revenue freed Hansberry to devote her full energies to a play about a struggling, working-class black family, like the families who rented her father's properties on Chicago's South Side—A Raisin in the Sun.

A Raisin in the Sun depicts the frustrations of a black family whose dreams of economic progress have been thwarted. After a pre-Broadway tour, it opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City on 11 March 1959 to instant critical and popular success. In 1961, it was produced as a film with most of the original cast and won a special award at the Cannes Film Festival. During this period, Hansberry was much in demand as a public speaker. She articulated her belief that art is social and that black writers must address all issues of humankind. As the civil rights movement intensified, she helped to organize fund-raising activities in support of organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), called for the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and declared that President John E. Kennedy had endangered world peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

During the last four years of her life, Hansberry worked hard on several plays. The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window was produced on Broadway in 1964, but critics were less receptive to this play that challenged the ennui of Greenwich Village intellectuals. During its short run, Hansberry battled pancreatic cancer, diagnosed in 1963. She died on 12 January 1965, the same night that her play closed.

Hansberry left a number of finished and unfinished writings that indicate the breadth of her social and artistic vision. Robert Nemiroff, whom she had divorced in 1964 but designated as her literary executor, adapted some of her writings for the stage under the title To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a show that became the longest-running drama of the 1968–1969 Off-Broadway season and toured colleges and communities in the United States during 1970 and 1971. He also edited and published an anthology of her work (reissued in 1994) that included Les Blancs, a play about liberation movements; The Drinking Gourd, a television play commissioned by NBC but shelved as too controversial to produce; and What Use Are Flowers?, a fantasy on the consequences of nuclear holocaust. Among her other writings were a musical adaptation of Oliver LaFarge's Laughing Boy; an adaptation of The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Waddell Chesnutt; a screenplay based on Jacques Romain's novel about Haiti, Masters of the Dew; and a critical commentary on Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, a book that had significant impact on Hansberry's thinking. Until 1991 when he died, Robert Nemiroff devoted his life to editing, promoting, and producing Hansberry's works on stage and television.

Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is a classic of the American theater, frequently produced and an inspiration for young writers and artists. In recent years, a feminist revisioning of her plays and some of her unpublished writings affirm her politically progressive views, her sophistication about gender issues, and her sensitivity to homosexuality and opposition to homophobia. As more of her work is made accessible, the full extent of Hansberry's vision and contribution to American letters will be revealed.

[See also Beneatha Younger; Mama Lena Younger; Walter Lee Younger.]

Bibliography

• To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, adapted by Robert Nemiroff, 1969.
• Freedomways, special issue, “Lorraine Hansberry: Art of Thunder, Vision of Light” 19.4 (1979).
• Ernest Kaiser and Robert Nemiroff, “A Lorraine Hansberry Bibliography,” Freedomways 19.4 (1979): 285–304.
• Lorraine Hansberry, “All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors,” Village Voice, 16 Aug. 1983, 11–19.
• Stephen R. Carter, “Lorraine Hansberry,” in DLB, vol. 38, Afro-American Writers after 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, eds. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, 1985, pp. 120–134.
• Stephen R. Carter, Hansberry's Drama: Commitment amid Complexity, 1991.
• Herb Boyd, “Lorraine Hansberry,” in Encyclopedia of the American Left, eds. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, 1992, pp. 288–289.
• Margaret B. Wilkerson, “Lorraine Hansberry,” in Black Women in America: An Historical Encylopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, 1993, pp. 524–529.
• Lorraine Hansberry, The Collected Last Plays: Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, What Use Are Flowers?, ed. Robert Nemiroff, 1994

Margaret B. Wilkerson

For more information on Lorraine Hansberry, visit Britannica.com.

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (1930-1965) was an important American writer and a major figure on Broadway. Although her reputation grew with the posthumous publication of a range of works, she remained best known for the play and movie "A Raisin in the Sun".

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Carl A. Hansberry, was prominent in Chicago's African American business and political community. He owned real estate, generously supported African American causes, and ran for Congress as a Republican; her mother, Nanny Perry Hansberry, taught school and also was active in politics. The Hansberry home, where Lorraine was the youngest of four children, was often visited by famous African Americans.

In 1938 the Hansberrys moved into a white neighborhood that excluded African Americans through the then widely used restrictive covenants. Carl Hansberry, while resisting attacks on his home and family from neighborhood hoodlums, took his case to court. Although armed guards protected the children, at one point a slab of concrete almost crushed Lorraine. In 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled restrictive covenants unconstitutional in a case that came to be known as Hansberry v. Lee, although it did little to affect the actual practice of segregated housing in Chicago. Carl Hansberry died in 1946 before he could complete plans to move his family to Mexico City when Lorraine's two brothers had difficulties accommodating to segregation in the U.S. Army.

After graduating from high school in 1948 Lorraine is reported to have studied variously at the University of Chicago; at the Art Institute of Chicago; at the New School of Social Research in New York; in Guadalajara, Mexico; and at the University of Wisconsin, where she saw a production of Sean O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock about the problems of a poor urban family in Dublin in 1922 during the early conflict between the Irish Republican Army and the British occupying forces. It is supposed to have inspired her to think of creating a comparable work about an African American family.

It was during her years in New York, living in Greenwich Village, that Hansberry became intimately involved with a number of the liberal causes of the period. In 1952 she attended the Intercontinental Peace Congress in Montevideo, Uruguay, as a substitute for Paul Robeson, who could not get a passport from the U.S. State Department. At the congress she met politically astute feminists from all over the world.

In 1953 she married Robert Nemiroff, who was a graduate student in history and English at New York University and participated, like his fellows, in the leftist political events of the time. The two met while picketing. The night before their wedding they joined a protest against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage. After a series of part-time jobs, including those of typist and assistant to a furrier, Hansberry settled down to the writing of a play, which eventually took its title from a poem by Langston Hughes, "Harlem, " which declared that "a dream deferred" might "dry up/like a raisin in the sun." Nemiroff and his friends were to be instrumental in getting the play produced.

A Raisin in the Sun was finished in 1957 and opened on March 11, 1959, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. It is unique in several respects. It was the first play to be produced on Broadway written and directed by an African American and to have an all-black cast. The original production starred Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Claudia McNeil and was directed by Lloyd Richards. Ossie Davis eventually replaced Poitier. In May 1959 the New York Drama Critics Circle voted it Best Play of the Year for a season that included works by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Archibald Macleish. Hansberry was the youngest American to win that award. The play had a long run and was made into a movie with a script by Hansberry and with Poitier repeating his stage role. Later it was turned into a Broadway musical, Raisin.

One of the more enthusiastic and perceptive assessments of A Raisin in the Sun came from the English critic Kenneth Tynan. "The supreme virtue of A Raisin in the Sun," he wrote, "is its proud, joyous proximity to its source, which is life as the dramatist has lived it. The relaxed, freewheeling interplay of a magnificent team of African American actors drew me unresisting into a world of their making, their suffering, their thinking, and their rejoicing." Although Hansberry herself insisted that her play was essentially about an African American family in a particular time and place, some critics - of both races - suggested that it simply "happened" to be about African Americans.

Hansberry's next play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, opened and closed in 1965. Some critics felt that this play was an advance in subtlety and complexity over A Raisin in the Sun. It recorded some of the conflicts and paradoxes suffered by intellectuals in confronting the real world. One character, for example, an African American, while sensitive to white discrimination, is himself vicious about gay and white persons.

Hansberry's work continued to develop in ambition, breadth, sophistication, and depth. Although already ill, she wrote a parody of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot; planned a musical adaptation of Oliver La Farge's novel about the Navajos, Laughing Boy; and worked on her major play, Les Blancs, the title of which ("The Whites") carried an obvious reference to Jean Genet's The Blacks. She also wrote a television drama on slavery, which, while it did not appear on television, was published in 1972 as The Drinking Gourd. Other works included The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, which showed pictures of brutal attacks on African Americans in the South, and What Use Are Flowers?

In 1963 she left her hospital bed to give a talk to the winners of the United Negro College Fund writing contest, in which she used the phrase "To be young, gifted, and Black, " which later became the title of her own autobiography, a collection of her assorted writings edited by Nemiroff. She died of cancer on January 16, 1965.

Further Reading

The best short summary of her career and writing appears in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB), vol. 38. It was written by Steven R. Carter of the University of Puerto Rico, and much of the information in this article was taken from it. Carter also has an essay on her, "Commitment Amid Complexity: Lorraine Hansberry's Life-in-Action, " MELUS, 7 (Fall 1980). A full biography is Catherine Scheader's They Found a Way: Lorraine Hansberry (1978). Doris E. Abramson's Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre: 1925-1959 (1969) puts Hansberry's work in a larger context. A moving memoir by James Baldwin appears in To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969). The standard bibliography is by Ernest Kaiser and Robert Nemiroff, "A Lorraine Hansberry Bibliography, " Free-domways, 19 (Fourth Quarter 1979), although critical studies continued to appear more than 20 years after her death.

playwright

Personal Information

Born Lorraine Vivian Hansberry, May 19, 1930, in Chicago, IL; died of cancer, January 12, 1965; daughter of Carl Augustus (a real estate entrepreneur) and Nannie (Perry) Hansberry; married Robert Nemiroff, June 20, 1953 (divorced March 10, 1964).
Education: Attended University of Wisconsin, 1948-50; studied painting in Mexico, summer 1949; studied art at Roosevelt University, summer 1950; attended New School for Social Research, New York, fall 1950; studied African history and culture with W. E. B. Du Bois, Jefferson School for Social Science, New York, 1953.
Politics: Young Progressives of America, 1948-50; various peace and freedom movements, 1950-65.
Memberships: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 1962-65.

Career

Freedom (periodical), staff writer, 1951-52, associate editor, 1952-53, occasional contributor, 1953-55; represented Paul Robeson at Intercontinental Peace Congress, Montevideo, Uruguay, 1952; taught at Frederick Douglass School, Harlem, 1952; full-time writer, beginning 1956; completed draft of A Raisin in the Sun, 1957, and wrote screenplay for Columbia Pictures, 1960; commissioned to write slavery drama, The Drinking Gourd, for NBC-TV, 1960; drama canceled by NBC before airing; began working on opera, Toussaint, and several other plays, 1960; mobilized support and fund-raised for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 1962; joined James Baldwin and others to meet with Attorney General Robert Kennedy on racial crisis, 1963; wrote The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, for SNCC, 1964.

Life's Work

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry ushered in a new era of U.S. theater history. She brought to the stage the realistic portrayal of urban, working-class African American life. Writer James Baldwin offered insights into the impact of her work through his description of the staging of her landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun: "I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater," he related in a 1969 introduction to Hansberry's adapted autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black. "And the reason was that 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."

But Hansberry did more than just expand the content of realistic stage drama to include African Americans. When her additional writings became available in the 1980s, several literary critics argued for an even broader recognition of her stature. In his 1991 book Hansberry's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity, Steven R. Carter commented: "When Lorraine Hansberry died at thirty-four, she left a wide and rich dramatic heritage, although only a small part of it was visible then, and some parts have yet to become known. When all of her work is brought into view, she should be seen as one of the most important playwrights of this century, not simply on the basis of the one play already considered a classic, but on her collective work."

Hansberry's writings are a synthesis of a variety of artistic trends and genres. She created her own distinctly broad literary vision by incorporating into her works penetrating views of prevailing social conditions, along with aspects of her own life and experiences. The author is said to have endured a lifelong struggle between her upper-middle-class affluence and her unwavering commitment to black liberation and freedom from all forms of oppression. In the New York Times, critic Paula Giddings remarked that Hansberry's body of work reflects elements of the black protest movement of the forties, elements of the universal, non-racial themes predominant during the fifties, and elements of the black nationalist movement of the sixties. And in his commentary on the original, uncut screenplay for the film A Raisin in the Sun, filmmaker Spike Lee wrote: "Today, everybody and their mother are talking about 'Afrocentricity.' But Hansberry was writing about it long before it became fashionable."

When Hansberry's first play, A Raisin in the Sun, surpassed plays by noted authors Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Archibald MacLeish to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the year in 1959, she became the first black writer, the fifth woman, and the youngest American playwright ever to receive the honor. Since then, critics such as Frank Rich of the New York Times and David Richards of the Washington Post have recognized the play as an American classic, comparable in Richards's eyes to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Williams's Glass Menagerie.

In A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry portrays a black, working-class family in Chicago struggling to achieve--with dignity--upward social mobility and the freedom to buy property in a wealthy, suburban, white neighborhood. Set in a cramped apartment on Chicago's South Side, the play depicts an experience Hansberry knew. In an address quoted in To Be Young, Gifted and Black, she recounted her knowledge of the time and place of the play: "I was born on the Southside of Chicago. I was born black and a female. I was born in a depression after one world war, and came into my adolescence during another. While I was still in my teens the first atom bombs were dropped on human beings at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and by the time I was twenty-three years old my government and that of the Soviet Union had entered actively into the worst conflict of nerves in human history--the Cold War."

While Hansberry does not address these particular world events in Raisin, she captures the tensions of the era in which the drama is set. Raisin centers on the tribulations of the Youngers, a black family caught up in a charged "conflict of nerves" as they attempt to move into Clybourne Park, a white Chicago suburb, in the 1950s. In the play, Karl Lindner of the "Clybourne Park Improvement Association" tries to pay off the Youngers to keep them from moving into the neighborhood and suggests that members of the family may meet with violence if they follow through with their plans.

This scenario parallels one that Hansberry herself experienced during her youth. Hansberry's parents, Carl Augustus and Nannie Perry Hansberry, earned a considerable amount of wealth in Chicago when Carl rose from bank teller to banking and real estate entrepreneur. His innovation of a small-scale "kitchenette" for one- or two-bedroom apartments brought him financial success in real estate during the Great Depression. In 1938, after living on the South Side for eight years, the Hansberrys began searching for a larger home. Carl Hansberry soon decided on a house in a predominantly white neighborhood.

While sitting on the porch one day, eight-year-old Lorraine Hansberry and her sister Mamie watched an angry white mob gather in front of their house. The sisters retreated into the living room and were chased by a brick that crashed through a front window and lodged itself in the opposite wall. The brick narrowly missed Lorraine. Anne Cheney, writing in the biography Lorraine Hansberry, quoted the effect of the episode on Hansberry, as later related by the writer's husband, Robert Nemiroff: "Who knows which part had the greatest impact on the child--the brick? the mother sitting up nights with a gun? the incidents to and from school? the father away in Washington? the fact that the cops did not defend the home but that blacks had to come from outside to do so? the fact that the family was then evicted by the Supreme Court of Illinois?"

If Hansberry knew the struggles of the Youngers from her own experiences, she also learned of their dignity during her youth. Hansberry's parents turned their home at South Park Way into a social center for distinguished African American intellectuals and artists. Visitors included noted American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and singer Paul Robeson, both of whom would later play more significant formative roles in Hansberry's life. And Hansberry's mother ensured that her children were in touch with their roots: she brought the children to visit their grandmother in Tennessee, where they heard stories of how their enslaved grandfather had run away and hidden from his master in the same hills they looked on. Hansberry's father, meanwhile, maintained an active and ambitious lifestyle, evident in his success in business and in his active political life. In 1940, for example, he campaigned door-to-door throughout his home community in what eventually turned out to be an unsuccessful run for U.S. Congress. By the time Hansberry was in elementary school, she knew that she would attend either Howard University, where her sister Mamie later enrolled, or the University of Wisconsin.

Hansberry decided to pursue a degree at the University of Wisconsin but ended up staying for only two years, from 1948 to 1950. She never felt involved in her overall academic life, but outside of class she fell in love with the theater and began forming her radical political beliefs. Living off campus because housing was unavailable in 1948 for black students, Hansberry commuted each day to attend classes in literature, history, philosophy, art, mathematics, and science. Excited by her humanities classes and bored by the sciences, Hansberry balanced As and Fs to maintain the bare minimum average to remain in school.

Outside of class, she developed a variety of interests. A production of Irish playwright Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock inspired her imagination and precipitated both her participation in student theater and her study of the works of modern masters such as Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. In the fall term of her second year, Hansberry became campus chairman of the Young Progressives of America in support of Henry Wallace's 1948 candidacy. Upon his defeat, she grew disaffected with party politics. But Hansberry continued to enjoy her friendships with African students and a number of young campus radicals. Her network of friends in Wisconsin would later become the material for a section of her unfinished autobiographical novel All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors. But social and racial obstacles stood in the path of her success at the University of Wisconsin. In a theater class on set design in her second year, for example, she received a D from a professor who considered her work above average but who said he did not want to encourage a young black woman to enter a white-dominated field. In 1950, Hansberry left the university and headed for New York.

There, the fledgling writer began classes at the New School for Social Research, wrote articles for the Young Progressives of America magazine, and by 1951, joined the staff of Paul Robeson's magazine Freedom. As a staff writer for the periodical over the next three years, Hansberry wrote on Africa, women, New York social issues, and the arts. She traveled widely on assignment for the magazine, covering the U.S., Africa, and South America. While writing on social inequities in New York City, Hansberry developed into what Cheney called an "intellectual revolutionary." Meanwhile, her writing skills improved. "Shuttling about the city--from the Waldorf-Astoria to Broadway back to Harlem schools--Lorraine Hansberry did sharpen her journalistic tools," Cheney wrote in Lorraine Hansberry. "She learned to interview easily; she started to sift important figures from mazes of paper; she began to penetrate the facades of people and events."

While a journalist for Freedom, Hansberry also developed public speaking skills by teaching classes at Frederick Douglass School in Harlem and by attending and speaking at political rallies. At a protest of the exclusion of black players from the basketball team at New York University in 1951, Hansberry met her future husband, Robert Nemiroff, a white, Jewish graduate student in literature at the university. Hansberry worked for a while in the Greenwich Village restaurant owned by Nemiroff's family. The two developed a close emotional and intellectual relationship, and on June 20, 1953, they were married.

During the following few years Hansberry worked at a variety of jobs, including that of typist, secretary, recreation leader for the Federation for the Handicapped, and occasional contributor for Freedom before it went bankrupt in 1955. Nemiroff, meanwhile, had graduated with his master's degree from NYU; he became first a reader and copywriter for Sears Readers' Club and later promotions director of Avon Books. Together they absorbed the rich cultural milieu of Greenwich Village, remained active on picket lines and at all-night vigils for desegregation, and enjoyed the company of friends. Hansberry would later write about these times in her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window.

In 1956, Robert Nemiroff and a friend, Burt D'Lugoff, wrote a song together. Hansberry suggested the title, "Cindy, Oh, Cindy" and the song became a hit, earning $100,000 in 1956. This income freed both Hansberry and Nemiroff to write full time. Nemiroff wrote a play, Postmark Zero, performed on Broadway in 1965, while Hansberry penned a number of works, including A Raisin in the Sun, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, which was produced in 1964, and several more in between.

As early as 1959, Hansberry began researching for The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. In 1960, she imagined the basic plot of her play Les Blancs, adapted for production in 1970 by Robert Nemiroff. Also in 1960, Hansberry wrote the final script of the television series The Drinking Gourd. The program was commissioned by NBC-TV as part of a special series on the Civil War, but network executives eventually decided it was too violent and divisive for television. It was canceled before it ever aired. In 1961, Hansberry envisioned the premise of What Use Are Flowers?, a fantasy for television, but recast it as a play in 1962. Also in 1961, she began carrying out a debate about race with writer Norman Mailer through the pages of the Village Voice. Around the same time, Hansberry and Nemiroff moved to a comfortable house modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture in Croton-on-Hudson, a 60-minute train ride from downtown Manhattan. Hansberry would live there until her death in 1965.

By 1963, Hansberry's strength began to deteriorate, and she discovered that she had been stricken with cancer. The exact cause was never determined, but medical researchers could not rule out emotional strain as a contributory factor. Meanwhile, Hansberry published a documentary history of the civil rights movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), entitled The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. She also worked on a number of projects that remained unfinished at the time of her death, including an epic opera titled Toussaint, about Toussaint L'Ouverture, the late eighteenth-century liberator of Haiti. All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors, an unpublished autobiographical novel, also remained incomplete upon her death. In addition, Hansberry noted ideas for a number of other plays, including one about the Pharaoh Akhnaton, another on eighteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft, still another on Native Americans called Laughing Boy, and one on black American fiction writer Charles Chestnutt's novel The Marrow of Tradition.

The tensions of publicity--combined, say some sources, with Hansberry's confused sexual identity--put a strain on her marriage to Nemiroff, and in March of 1964 they privately obtained a divorce in Mexico. Still, Nemiroff worked as producer of Brustein and stayed with Hansberry in the hospital whenever he was not working on the play. Hansberry's cancer had advanced and she was hospitalized from October of 1964 to January of 1965, when she died. Hansberry chose her ex-husband to be the executor of her literary estate. For the rest of his life, Nemiroff devoted himself to publicizing her works. To that end, he wrote introductions for A Raisin in the Sun, saw to the play's publication, and--editing Hansberry's own writings--created the drama To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words.

Over six hundred people attended Lorraine Hansberry's funeral in Harlem on January 15, 1965. The presiding reverend, Eugene Callender, recited messages from James Baldwin and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Cheney reprinted the end of King's letter, which read: "Her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn."

Awards

New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the year, 1959, for A Raisin in the Sun; Screen Writers Guild Award nomination for best screenplay and Cannes Film Festival Award, both 1961, for film version of A Raisin in the Sun.

Works

Writings

• Nonfiction The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, Simon & Schuster, 1964.
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, introduction by James Baldwin, Prentice-Hall, 1969.
• Plays A Raisin in the Sun, opened in New Haven and Philadelphia, moved to Chicago, then produced on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, March 11, 1959; published by New American Library, 1961.
• Les Blancs, single scene staged at Actors Studio Workshop, New York, 1963; two-act play produced at Longacre Theater, New York City, 1970.
• The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, produced on Broadway, 1964; published by Random House, 1965.
• Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" and "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window," New American Library, 1966.
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black, adapted for the stage by Robert Nemiroff, first produced at the Cherry Lane Theater, January 2, 1969; acting edition published by Samuel French, 1971.
• Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, edited by Robert Nemiroff, introduction by Julius Lester, Random House, 1972, reprinted, New American Library, 1983.
• Lorraine Hansberry: The Collected Last Plays (Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, What Use Are Flowers?), edited by Robert Nemiroff, New American Library, 1983.

• A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay, edited by Robert Nemiroff, Plume, 1992.
• All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors, an unfinished novel.
• Author of about two dozen articles for Freedom, 1951-55, and over 25 essays for other publications, including the Village Voice, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Freedomways, Mademoiselle, Ebony, Playbill, Show, Theatre Arts, Black Scholar, Monthly Review, and Annals of Psychotherapy.

Further Reading

Books

• Abramson, Doris E.,Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre,1925-1959, Columbia University Press, 1969, pp. 165-266.
• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Carter, Steven R., Hansberry's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity, University of Illinois Press, 1991.
• Cheney, Anne, Lorraine Hansberry, Twayne, 1984.
• Davis, Arthur P., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960, Howard University Press, pp. 203-07.
• Hansberry, Lorraine, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, introduction by James Baldwin, Penguin Books, 1969.
• Hansberry, Lorraine, A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay, edited by Robert Nemiroff, foreword by Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff, commentary by Spike Lee, Penguin Books USA, 1992.

• Black American Literature Forum, Spring 1983, pp. 8-13.
• Commentary, June 1959, pp. 527-30.
• Freedomways (special issue), 19:4, 1979.
• New Yorker, May 9, 1959.
• New York Times, January 13, 1965; October 5, 1983, p. C24.
• New York Times Review of Books, March 31, 1991, p. 25.
• Theatre Journal, December 1986, pp. 441-52.
• Time, January 22, 1965.
• Village Voice, August 12, 1959, pp. 7-8.
• Washington Post, November 17, 1986, p. D1.
• Additional information available on sound recording Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: Art and the Black Revolution, Caedmon, 1972.

— Nicholas S. Patti

Lorraine Hansberry
Born	May 19, 1930(1930-05-19) Chicago, Illinois
Died	January 12, 1965 (aged 34) New York City
Occupation	playwright, author
Nationality	United States

Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930^[1] – January 12, 1965) was an African American, playwright, and author of political speeches, letters, and essays.^[2] Her best known work, A Raisin in the Sun, was inspired by her family's legal battle against racially segregated housing laws in the Washington Park Subdivision of the South Side of Chicago during her childhood.^[3]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Death 4 Other works 5 Legacy 6 Her Works 7 Bibliography 8 See also 9 References 10 External links

Early life

Lorraine Hansberry was the fourth child born to Carl Augustus Hansberry (a prominent real estate broker) and Nannie Louise Perry, and niece of the Africanist Professor William Leo Hansberry,^[4] after whom the Hansberry Institute of African Studies in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria, was named.^[5] She grew up on the south side of Chicago in the Woodlawn neighborhood.^[6]

The family moved into an all-white neighborhood, where they faced racial discrimination.^[7] Hansberry attended a predominantly white public school while her parents fought against segregation. Hansberry's father engaged in a legal battle against a racially restrictive covenant that attempted to prohibit African-American families from buying homes in the area.^[8] The legal struggle over their move led to the landmark Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940). Though victorious in the Supreme Court, Hansberry's family was subjected to what Hansberry would later ironically describe as a "warm and cuddly white neighborhood". This experience later inspired her to write her most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun.^[8]

Career

Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but found college to be uninspiring and left in 1950 to pursue her career as a writer in New York City, where she attended The New School.^[8] She worked on the staff of the Black newspaper Freedom under the auspices of Paul Robeson, and also worked with W. E. B. DuBois, whose office was in the same building.^[9] A Raisin in the Sun was written at this time, and was a huge success. It was the first play written by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. Thus, at 29 years of age, she became the youngest American playwright and only the 5th woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the year.^[10] While many of her other writings were published in her lifetime - essays, articles, and the text for the SNCC book The Movement - the only other play given a contemporary production was The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window.^[11]

Death

After a long battle with cancer, she died on January 12, 1965 at the age of thirty-four.^[12] According to James Baldwin, Hansberry was prescient about many of the increasingly troubling conditions in the world, and worked to remedy them with literature. Baldwin believed "it is not at all farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man."^[13] She was also a lesbian but that didn't stop her career.

Other works

The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window ran for 110 performances on Broadway^[14] and closed the night she died. Her ex-husband Robert Nemiroff became the executor for several unfinished manuscripts.^[12] He added minor changes to complete the play Les Blancs, which Julius Lester termed her best work, and he adapted many of her writings into the play, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was the longest-running Off-Broadway play of the 1968-1969 season.^[15] It appeared in book form the following year under the title, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words.

She left behind an unfinished novel and several other plays, including The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers?, with a range of content, from slavery to a post apocalyptic future.^[12]

Raisin, a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, opened in New York in 1973, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical, book by Nemiroff, music by Judd Woldin, and lyrics by Robert Britten.

A Raisin in the Sun was revived on Broadway in 2004 and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Revival of a Play. The cast included Sean "P Diddy" Combs as Walter Lee Younger Jr., Phylicia Rashad (Tony Award winner for Best Actress) and Audra McDonald (Tony Award winner for Best Featured Actress).^[16] It was produced for television in 2008 with the same cast; the production garnered two NAACP Image awards.

Legacy

Hansberry contributed to the understanding of abortion, discrimination, and Africa. Less well known is the fact Hansberry was a closeted black lesbian. She joined the Daughters of Bilitis and contributed letters to their magazine, The Ladder, in 1957 that addressed feminism and homophobia.

In San Francisco, The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, which specializes in original stagings and revivals of African-American theatre, is named in her honor. Singer and pianist Nina Simone, who was a close friend of Hansberry, used the title of her unfinished play to write a civil rights-themed song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" together with Weldon Irvine. The single reached the top 10 of the R&B charts.^[17] A studio recording by Simone was released as a single and the first live recording on October 26, 1969 was captured on Black Gold (1970).

Her grandniece is actress Taye Hansberry. Lincoln University's first-year female dormitory is named Lorraine Hansberry Hall.^[18] There is a school in the Bronx called Lorraine Hansberry Academy and an elementary school in St. Albans, New York named after the famous author and playwright.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Lorraine Hansberry on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[19]

Both A Raisin in the Sun and A Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window are staples of high school English classrooms, richly discussed and debated [citation needed]. A Raisin in the Sun famously opens with Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem".

Her Works

• A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
• A Raisin in the Sun (film), screenplay (1961)
  • A Raisin in the Sun (film), produced (2008)
• On Summer (Essay) (19??)
• The Drinking Gourd (1960)
• The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964)
• The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1965)
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969)
• Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays / by Lorraine Hansberry Edited by Robert Nemiroff (1994)

Bibliography

• James, Rosetta. Cliff Notes on Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Lincoln, Nebraska: Cliff Notes Inc., 1992
• Toussaint - This fragment from a work in progress, unfinished at the time of Ms. Hansberry's untimely death, deals with a Haitian plantation owner and his wife whose lives are soon to change drastically as a result of the revolution of Toussaint L'Ouverture. (From the Samuel French, Inc. catalogue of plays)

See also

• African American literature

References

1. ^ Carter 1980, p40.
2. ^ Lipari, Lisbeth. "Queering the borders: Lorraine Hansberry’s 1957 Letters to The Ladder" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Marriott Hotel, San Diego, CA, May 27, 2003 Online <.PDF>. 2008-06-28 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p112109_index.html>
3. ^ Carter, Stephen R., Commitment Amid Complexity: Lorraine Hansberry's Life in Action, MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), Vol. 7, Issue 3, at 39,40-41 (Autumn 1980), available at <http://www.jstor.org/stable/467027> (subscription required).
4. ^ Carter 1980, p. 40.
5. ^ Les Blancs: The Collected Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, 36.
6. ^ Harris, William, Woodlawn, University partners in education through Charter School, University of Chicago Chronicle, Vol. 26 No. 2 (Oct. 5, 2006), <http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/061005/woodlawn.shtml>
7. ^ Carter 1980, pp. 40-41.
8. ^ ^{a b c} Carter 1980, p. 41.
9. ^ Carter 1980, p. 41
10. ^ Carter 1980, p42
11. ^ Carter 1980, p43
12. ^ ^{a b c} Carter 1980, p. 43.
13. ^ Baldwin, James, Sweet Lorraine, introduction to Hansberry, Lorraine, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: An Informal Autobiography (Signet Paperback 1970), pxiv, ISBN 0451159527.
14. ^ Internet Broadway Database: The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window Production Credits
15. ^ Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, Introduction
16. ^ http://www.raisinonbroadway.com/news.html
17. ^ The Nina Simone Web, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" (1969)
18. ^ Lincoln University website
19. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.

1. The Internet Broadway Database
2. GLAAD: Creating Role Models
3. Hansberry, Lorraine
4. The Nina Simone Web: To Be Young, Gifted And Black (1969)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Lorraine Hansberry

• Biography
• PAL: Perspectives in American Literature
• Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color - Lorraine Hansberry
• Lorraine Hansberry's Gravesite
• The African Activist Archive Project includes a September 1959 photograph Lorraine Hansberry addresses airlift students from East Africa. The 81 students from East Africa were part of an airlift in a chartered plane to attend school in the U.S. organized by the African American Students Foundation.

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