For all its sympathy, humour and humanity … [A Raisin in the Sun] remains disappointing—the more so when compared with the achievement of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window…. Its weakness is essentially that of much of Broadway naturalism. It is an unhappy crossbreed of social protest and re-assuring resolution. Trying to escape the bitterness of Wright, Hansberry betrays herself into radical simplification and ill-defined affirmation…. [The] central fac...

To explain, a decade after the fact, to a college class in American drama how neatly A Raisin in the Sun fits into a logical evolution within the theatre, to justify its dramatic viewpoint, and to praise its creator for her skill in writing a black … play without "blackness," remaining all the while a black writer who refuses to call attention to the fact, will raise instant challenges. The accusations are many. Is not Lorraine Hansberry an Uncle (Aunt?) Tom? Is not A Raisin in the Sun ...

The subject matter of A Raisin in the Sun may make it appear outdated. The action taking place in what now seems like a long past time—the days before Black Power, antiwar protests, student uprisings and black rebellions. The play concerns itself with the Younger family: Mama Younger, who has survived and won; her son, Walter, the pivotal character of the play, the black male castrated by the blade of the American dream but who blames the castration on his wife; Ruth, Walter's wife, who sees t...

A Raisin in the Sun is an ego-play in that it describes how a Black family comes to the right relationship with "reality." (p. 109) It can be asked, if A Raisin in the Sun is oriented to reality, why does Walter willingly give up those things, i.e., independence and economic success, which we are told are real social and moral values in America? And how can the Youngers' moving into a white suburb be called "reality" and not wish-fulfillment? As a partial answer to these q...

One of the biggest selling points about [A Raisin in the Sun]—filling the grapevine, riding the word-of-mouth, laying the foundation for its wide, wide acceptance—was how much the Younger family was just like any other American family. Some people were ecstatic to find that "it didn't really have to be about Negroes at all!" It was, rather, a walking, talking, living demonstration of our mythic conviction that, underneath, all of us Americans, color-ain't-got-nothin...

Lorraine Hansberry took the title of her [first] play from a line by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / Like a raisin in the sun?" Her success was the winning of a dream that first came upon her in her young girlhood when she first read the poetry of Langston Hughes and others. Much of this poetry … was about Africa, and on this subject … curiously enough, Miss Hansberry also in a way completes a circle begun by Hughes. In a new and much more r...

Miss Hansberry's dialogue [in her screenplay adaptation for the film A Raisin in the Sun] is generally commonplace and occasionally ridiculous, her perception of character is on the level of Samuel French's catalogue of amateur plays, and her sense of structure is primitive…. The bulk of the play is garden-variety, lower-class domestic drama. Except for the daughter's Nigerian suitor and the superficial discussion of Negro modes of thought that he provokes, this could be, up to t...

As a piece of dramatic writing [A Raisin in the Sun] is old-fashioned. As something near to the conscience of a nation troubled by injustice to Negroes, it is emotionally powerful. Much of its success is due to our sentimentality over the "Negro question." Miss Hansberry has had the good sense to write about a Negro family with vices as well as virtues, and has spared us one of those well-scrubbed, light-skinned families who often appear in propaganda pieces about discrimination. If she avoids...

"A Raisin in the Sun" has vigor as well as veracity and is likely to destroy the complacency of any one who sees it…. "A Raisin in the Sun" is a play about human beings who want, on the one hand, to preserve their family pride and, on the other hand, to break out of the poverty that seems to be their fate. Not having any axe to grind, Miss Hansberry has a wide range of topics to write about—some of them hilarious, some of them painful in the extreme.