by Lorraine Hansberry

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry, born in Chicago in 1930, won acclaim in 1959 with the stage debut of her first play, A Raisin in the Sun. Depicting domestic life for a working-class black family in Chicago after World War II, the play became the first work by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. Hansberry's promising career would be cut short just six years later, when she died of cancer at age thirty-four.

Events in History at the Time the Play Takes Place

Great Migration. Between 1915 and 1970, millions of African Americans moved from their rural homes in the Deep South to the rapidly growing industrial cities of the North. Called the Great Migration, this long process of resettlement amounts to the largest mass movement in American history. It took place in two major phases of particularly heavy migration, 1915-...