Disappointed that his legal victory brought about little change, Hansberry was planning to move his family to Mexico when he died in 1945. Lorraine Hansberry said that he died "of a cerebral hemorrhage, supposedly, but American racism helped kill him."
Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin for two years where she took a course in stage design and saw the plays of Strindberg and Ibsen for the first time. She studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, then at Roosevelt College, also in Chicago, and in Guadalajara, Mexico. Unfulfilled by these activities, she moved to New York in 1950. There she worked at a series of jobs while trying to write short stories and plays. She was also a reporter and associate editor for Paul Robeson's monthly, Freedom. While on a picket line protesting discrimination at New York University, Hansberry met Robert Nemiroff, who became a songwriter and producer after their marriage in 1953.
She worked on three uncompleted plays and an unfinished semi-autobiographical novel before beginning A Raisin in the Sun in 1956. Hansberry told the New York Times, "One night, after seeing a play I won't mention, I suddenly became disgusted with a whole body of material about Negroes.
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