Dramatist Lorraine Hansberry broke social conventions by depicting black experiences of white prejudice. She also broke Broadway records by being both the youngest person and the first African American to win the Best Play award from the New York Drama Critics' Circle. Before that moment, black playwrights had tried in vain to find a mainstream audience. "A Raisin in the Sun" (1959), Hansberry's masterpiece, chronicles the personal and social problems faced by a black family in Chicago who attempt to move into a white neighborhood. By skillfully rendering the tensions between blacks and whites with a polychromatic emotional palette, the play revealed the dignity and pride of black families and the value of dreams for all races. By breaking the Broadway color barrier and earning a Tony nomination, Hansberry's drama became an unmitigated triumph for all audiences.
Hansberry enjoyed an intellectually rich childhood in Chicago; her politically prominent family hobnobbed with black intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes. Years of reporting for "Freedom," a progressive African American newspaper, inspired her keen sense of social justice, as did her interracial marriage to Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish intellectual she met at a protest against racist university policies.
Her second play, "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window" (1965), explores a world of relative morality as its idealist Jewish hero reassesses the lack of connection between his politics and his family life. Between completing her two dramas, Hansberry wrote several articles about racism, homophobia, sexism, and other social issues, never fully relinquishing her reporting roots nor yielding in her commitment to social activism. "Les Blancs" (1970) and "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words" (1969) were both edited and produced after Hansberry's untimely death from cancer at age 34.
While Hansberry often prefaced her work with the comment "I was born black and female," she never publicized her lesbian identity. Hansberry's homosexuality was affirmed in a 1957 letter to the lesbian periodical "The Ladder." Still, when she died in 1965, this facet of her life and her divorce from Nemiroff were not widely known, as such admissions would have had serious repercussions for Hansberry's reputation. Hansberry's brave, bold, visionary work presaged the flood of civil rights activism that would define the late 1960s as the age of liberation for ethnic minorities, women, and gays.
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