Raisin in the Sun, A, is a 1959 drama by the American playwright Lorraine Hansberry. It was her first play, and her only success as a dramatist. Hansberry died of cancer in 1965 at the age of 34. A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by an African American woman to open on Broadway. Its director, Lloyd Richards, was the first Black man to direct a play on Broadway. The play won the 1959 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play. Hansberry became the first African American, the first woman, and the youngest person ever to receive the award.
A Raisin in the Sun portrays the working-class Younger family, who live in a cramped apartment in a Chicago ghetto. Lena Younger is the widowed head of the family. She wants to use life insurance money from her husband’s death to purchase a home in an all-white neighborhood. Walter Lee, her son, loses most of the money in a scheme to buy a liquor store, but the family decides to move to the all-white neighborhood anyway.
The play won praise for its warmth and humor, and for its vivid characterizations. Hansberry provided a moving account of the dreams and frustrations of a family trapped in a cycle of racial prejudice and economic hardship. The play ends on a cautiously upbeat note, with Walter Lee emerging as a stronger man, filled with a new pride and dignity.
The well-known African American actors Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee played Walter Lee and his wife, Ruth. Claudia McNeil was the mother. The supporting cast included a group of young Black performers who went on to important careers in the theater. They were Diana Sands as Walter Lee’s sister Beneatha; Louis Gossett, Jr., as her suitor; Ivan Dixon as an African student; Glynn Turman as Walter Lee’s young son; and Lonne Elder III as one of Walter Lee’s friends. Poitier, Dee, and many of the supporting actors repeated their roles in a motion-picture version of A Raisin in the Sun in 1961. The play was adapted into the musical Raisin, which opened on Broadway in 1973.
The title of the play comes from a poem by the African American poet Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up?/Like a raisin in the sun?…/Or does it explode?”
