Lorraine Hansberry
(1930 - 1965)
(Full name Lorraine Vivian Hansberry) American playwright and essayist.
Lorraine Hansberry: Introduction
Lorraine Hansberry: Principal Works
Lorraine Hansberry: Primar...
Read more
Hansberry, Lorraine (1930-1965)
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 America...
Read more
Biography EssayAlthough 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 mos...
Read more
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 be...
Read more
Lorraine Hansberry is an African American writer who achieved a number of important firsts during her short life; she was the first black woman to write a play that was produced on Broadway as well as...
Read more
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 rac...
Read more
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 realiz...
Read more
Critical Essay by Gerald Weales
To Be Young, Gifted and Black, as everyone knows by now, is a patchwork play pieced together by Robert Nemiroff from the produced and unproduced works, the letters, the...
Read more
Critical Essay by Martin Gottfried
"Les Blancs" … is the play that Lorraine Hansberry left unfinished at her death in 1965 and it is as if the American racial dilemma of that time...
Read more
Critical Essay by Brendan Gill
So much has happened in Africa since 1961 [when Lorraine Hansberry began the writing of "Les Blancs"] that the play, laid in a Schweitzer-like medical miss...
Read more
Critical Essay by Walter Kerr
Virtually all of "Les Blancs" is … vivid, stinging, intellectually alive, and what is there is mature work, ready to stand without apology alongside ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Harold Clurman
I confess to have been more impressed by Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs … than I expected to be; more, indeed, than most of the professional theatre-tas...
Read more
Critical Essay by David E. Ness
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 u...
Read more
Critical Essay by Clive Barnes
["The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window"] is a play about idealism, liberalism and not selling-out, and it is written in something of the declamatory...
Read more
Critical Essay by W. Edward Farrison
The Drinking Gourd, a three-act drama well suited for television presentation, is what may be called in television jargon a documentary on American plantation slav...
Read more
Critical Essay by Bertie J. Powell
[The Drinking Gourd] portrays American plantation slavery which … characterizes a phase of the black experience. The title was taken from a spiritual, "...
Read more
Critical Essay by Gerald Weales
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...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Cutts
In its transference from stage to screen, Lorraine Hansberry's deeply moving play about an impoverished but indestructable Negro family, has, alas, lost more than i...
Read more
Critical Essay by Walter Kerr
Though Miss Hansberry is frequently guilty [in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window"] of ladling out words with a soup-spoon ("these two impl...
Read more
Critical Essay by Arthur France
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. Beneath...
Read more