Hansberry, Lorraine (1930-1965), was the first African American playwright to achieve critical and popular success on Broadway. She became famous for her first completed play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), a drama about the attempt of a Black family to escape from the Chicago ghetto. This play provides a study of the search for identity by African American men and women, both within the family and within a racially prejudiced American society.
Hansberry also wrote The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964). This drama portrays a Jewish liberal whose commitment to various social causes almost ruins his marriage. Before her death from cancer on Jan. 12, 1965, Hansberry began a play about race relations in Africa. The unfinished work was published as Les Blancs (1970). Selections from Hansberry’s letters and works were collected in To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969). Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago.
