“She was very aware of being a child of migration,” Perry explains. Hansberry, whose parents had moved from the Deep South during the Great Migration of African-Americans to the North, developed a nuanced view of racial issues. That experience had a profound effect on Lorraine Hansberry, shaping the story of A Raisin in the Sun, as well as her many stories and essays. “You know that somebody doesn’t like you, doesn’t want you there.” Their father, Carl Hansberry, sued for the right to buy a house where he wanted, eventually winning on a technicality at the U.S. “That was a grotesque sight to see that lodged in the wall,” Lorraine’s sister, Mamie, later said. A chunk of cement came flying through a window at the house, narrowly missing Lorraine and landing in the living room wall. White mobs threatened the Hansberrys, spitting on and cursing at Lorraine and her siblings. Rhodes Avenue in an area of Woodlawn where restrictive covenants forbade white property owners from selling to blacks. When Hansberry was seven, her family bought a house at 6140 S. Together, they’re bringing new light onto Hansberry’s life and literary legacy. But then, they did have lessons to reveal.” Perry’s book arrives on the heels of a PBS documentary, Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, which aired in January 2018 on the American Masters series. “She wrote the characters in all of her plays in an authentic way,” says Perry, a professor of African-American studies at Princeton University. In addition to plays, she’d written fiction and essays, demonstrating a thoughtful intellectual prowess, as well as a talent for creating realistic characters. Hansberry, a Chicago native who grew up on the South Side before moving to New York, died of cancer in 1965, at the age of 34, cutting short a life bursting with promise and potential. She wrote so much, in a very short life.”

“I didn’t realize how much she’d actually written. “What I kept hearing was: ‘She died so tragically young that we don’t know what she would have become,’” says Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, published Fall 2018 by Beacon Press. And it did not take long to gain status as a true American classic, becoming one of the country’s most-produced plays.Ī Raisin in the Sun is so beloved and respected that it has overshadowed Hansberry’s other writings - as well as the story of Hansberry herself.

It was filmed in 1961 with stars Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. When it made its New York premiere in 1959, it was the first time a script by a black woman had ever been performed on Broadway. Emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative, it vividly shows an African-American family’s struggles to escape the shackles of segregation on the city’s South Side. Without question, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is one of the most important plays ever written about Chicago.

Author a raisin in the sun