Lorraine Hansberry

Hansberry, Lorraine (1930–65), African American playwright and civil rights activist. She was the youngest American to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), about a black family living in Chicago. The first play by a black woman to run on Broadway, it was made into a film (1961), for which it won a Cannes Film Festival award. The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964), a play completed during her final illness, portrays conflicts in the life of a Jewish liberal. Other selected writings were collected in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1969).