Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry 1930-65, American playwright, b. Chicago. She grew up on Chicago's South Side. In 1959 she became the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway when A Raisin in the Sun opened to wide critical acclaim. The play dealt in human terms with the serious and comic problems of a black family in modern America. Her next play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964) was less successful. Hansberry died of cancer at 35. A collection of her writings, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, was published in 1969.

Hansberry, Lorraine (1930–65), Chicagoborn dramatist, became the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun (1959), an easy‐going comedy of a family of black Chicagoans who plan to move into a white neighborhood, illustrative of Langston Hughes's poem: “What happens to a dream deferred, Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” She followed this success with The Sign in Sidney's Brustein's Window (1964), depicting Jews and other whites as well as blacks in Greenwich Village. After her early death her husband assembled from her plays, letters, diaries, and other writings a dramatic presentation, To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969). For The Movement (1964) she wrote wry captions for photographs of blacks in their struggle for equality. Raisin (1973) was a musical adaptation of her first play by others.