Setting

Among the most important elements of A Raisin in the Sun is its setting. Because the Youngers are attempting to buy a new home in a different neighborhood, their current apartment and neighborhood achieve particular significance. The play takes place in a segregated Chicago neighborhood, "sometime between World War II and the present," which for Hansberry would be the late 1950s In other words, the play occurs during the late 1940s or the 1950s, a time when many Americans were prosperous and when some racial questions were beginning to be raised, but before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

More specifically, the play occurs in the Youngers' apartment, which Hansberry describes in detail: "Its furnishings are typical and undistinguished and then- primary feature now is that they have clearly had to accomodate the living of too many people for too many years." The furnishings, that is, come...