ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LORRAINE HANSBERRY touched the taproots of American life as only a very few playwrights ever can in A Raisin in the Sun, the play that made her in 1959, at 29, the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to win the Best Play of the Year Award of the New York Drama Critics. In Raisin, wrote James Baldwin, “never before in the entire history of the American theater had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage.” Published and produced worldwide in over thirty languages and in thousands of productions nationally, the play “changed American theater forever” and became an American classic, as The New York Times summarized recently. In 1961, Hansberry’s film adaptation of the play won a Cannes Festival Award and was nominated Best Screenplay; in the 1970s it was adapted into a Tony Award—winning musical; and in the 1980s a major resurgence began with revivals at a dozen regional theaters and the 1989 American Playhouse production for television of the complete play, unabridged for the first time.

On January 12, 1965, during the run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, cancer claimed Lorraine Hansberry. She was 34. “Her creative literary ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today,” predicted Martin Luther King, Jr., on her death, “will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.” These words have proved prophetic as more and more of her work has become known.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a portrait of Hansberry in her own words, was the longest-running off-Broadway drama of 1969; it has been staged in every state of the Union, recorded, filmed, televised, and expanded into the widely read “informal autobiography” of the same title (not to be confused with the play), while the title itself (from her last speech) has entered the language. Les Blancs (The Whites), her drama of revolution in Africa, presented posthumously on Broadway, received the votes of six critics for Best American Play of 1970 and, since its acclaimed revival at the Arena Stage in 1988, has begun a resurgence of its own with productions planned at many regional theaters.

In her plays Hansberry illuminated the extraordinary lives and aspirations of “ordinary” people—black and white, American, African, and European—confronting the most fundamental challenges and choices of the century. Her published works include the above-mentioned plays, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: An Informal Autobiography, and Lorraine Hansberry: The Collected Last Plays and The Movement, a photohistory of the Civil Rights struggle. Excerpts from her speeches and interviews are recorded in the Caedmon album Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: Art and the Black Revolution.