![]() “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. ![]()
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