Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”: Author’s Biography; Background Study and Plot

Author’s Background

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, the youngest of four children.  Her parents were well-educated, successful black citizens who publicly fought discrimination against black people. When Hansberry was a child, she and her family lived in a black neighbourhood on Chicago’s South Side. During this era, segregation – the enforced separation of whites and blacks-was still legal and widespread throughout the South.

In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, a white Jewish artist and political activist.  In the following years she wrote her first play, “A Raisin in the Sun”, which opened in March 1959.

She had made history as the first black female author to have a work staged on Broadway.  The play was a great critical and popular success, making history again when Hansberry became the first black playwright, the fifth woman and the younger ever American to win the New York Critics’ Award.

Her second staged play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, closed on the day Hansberry died of cancer at the age of just thirty-four.