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....

Although her life was brutally curtailed by cancer at only thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry's contribution to Afro-American culture was considerable, much richer and more varied than most people realize. Her first staged drama, A Raisin in the Sun...

Lorraine Hansberry gained prominence as the first black among the handful of American women playwrights to have a Broadway success, A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Too often pigeonholed because of her race, sex, and short career, Hansberry deserves more...

A black American playwright who produced only two plays before her death from cancer at 34, Lorraine Hansberry nonetheless made a tremendous contribution to the American stage and to African American culture. Her first and best known play, A Raisin in...

The first African American and the youngest woman to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Hansberry is best known for her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The story of a black working-class family and their decision to move into a white...

Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and litigant in the United States Supreme Court case, Hansberry v....

Each year we celebrate Black History Month in February with the hope that the achievements of black men and women will not be ignored, forgotten or misunderstood. It was therefore disturbing to read the comments made by David Richards in his review of Lorraine...

Compiled by Steven C. Johnson and Donna Solimine The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 02-01-1996 A MONTH OF JAZZ, FILM, AND LORRAINE HANSBERRY Compiled by Steven C. Johnson and Donna Solimine Date: 02-01-1996, Thursday Section: LIFESTYLE / ENTERTAINMENT Edition: All Editions -- 3 Star,...

Today is Wednesday, April 25, the 115th day of 2007. There are 250 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:Five hundred years ago, on April 25, 1507, America got its name from German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller, who first used the term on a world...

Photographs by GuzmanHere, at Manhattan's Royale Theater, you are only to refer to him as Walter Lee. No Sean Combs, no Puffy, no P. Diddy. All reminders of his bold-faced life are to be left at the door. "I've got to stay in character," the...

The playwright who is a Negro is faced with a special problem. Broadway has a tradition of Negro shows, inevitably folksy or exotic, almost always musical, of which the only virtue is that Negro performers get a chance to appear as something more than filler. The obvious reaction to such shows is the protest play, the Negro agitprop, which can be as false to American Negro life as the musicals. A playwright with serious intentions, like Miss Hansberry, has to avoid both pitfalls, has to try to write not a N...

The compelling thing about Sidney Brustein is that although political commitment is the overriding concern, by and large the play is not about political issues in the usual sense. It concerns a small group of rather ordinary people who face a variety of real problems in their lives…. Sidney, in the midst of this group, has more "social conscience" than any of them but is really not up to the role of ethical and political standard-bearer that he pretends. Until Iris leaves him, his aware...

The people who surround Walter Lee are all trying to get him to adjust to the conditions of life for a Negro in a white man's world. All except Beneatha. Beneatha seeks her own escape first in a series of hobbies and fads, then in intellectualism and a desire to find her African roots. All this is played against the backdrop of a society that is indifferently hostile to the aspirations of black folk in an environment of ignorance, lassitude, hate, filth and poverty. The Younger's apartment is ...