Lorraine Hansberry Biography

American playwright, born in Chicago, educated at the University of Wisconsin. She is best known for A Raisin in the Sun (1959), a play about an African-American family preparing to move from a Chicago ghetto to the suburbs. It focuses on the head of the family, Lena Younger, a widow determined to fulfil her dead husband's optimistic ambitions, which she shared, for the family against all the odds. It was made into a film in 1961, and a musical entitled Raisin in 1973. The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964) probes further into city life, with its large cast of Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, and others living in New York's Greenwich Village. To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969) is a posthumous selection by her former husband, Robert Nemiroff, from her letters, diaries, and other unpublished material.