Lorraine Hansberry(1930-1965)

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago as the daughter of a prominent
real-estate broker and the niece of a Harvard University professor of African
history. Her parents were intellectuals and activists. Her father won an
antisegregation case before the Illinois Supreme Court, upon which the events
in A Raisin in the Sun was loosely based. When she was eight, her parents
bought a house in a white neighborhood and their experience of discrimination
there led to a civil rights case, which they won. Hansberry's parents sent her to
public schools rather than private ones as a protest against the segregation
laws. She studied art at the University of Wisconsin and in Mexico. In 1950
she moved to New York, where she started her career as a writer. She wrote
for an African-American newspaper called Freedom, and met among others
the famous writer Langston Hughes.

In 1953 Hansberry married a Jewish songwriter. She worked as a waitress and
cashier, writing on her spare time. A Raisin in the Sun gained a huge success.
The play took its title from a line in Langston Hughes's poem. The film version
of 1961, starring Sidney Poitier, received a special award at the Cannes
festival.

Hansberry's next play, THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN'S WINDOW
(1964), was set in the New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village,
where she had long made her home. This time the protagonist was a Jewish
intellectual. The play had only modest success on Broadway. Her premature
death, at the age of thirty-four, cut short her promising career. She died of
cancer on January 12, 1965, at the age of 34. Her husband published a
collection of letter and other writings after hear death. Hansberry's TO BE
YOUNG, GIFTED, AND BLACK, adapted from her writings, was produced
Off-Broadway in 1969. It also appeared in book form next year. LES
 BLANCS, a drama set in Africa, and adapted by her ex-husband Robert
Nemiroff, was produced in 1970.

In 1973, Neminoff and Charlotte Zaltzberg adapted Hansberry's famous play
into a musical, entitled Raisin. It won the Tony Award. Raisin was revived in
1981, when Claudia McNeil, who had played Lena in the original 1959
production, recreated the role in the musical adaptation. Sidney Poitier has told
in his autobiography The Measure of a Man (2000) that he had much troubles
with the author in the 1959 production. Poitier criticized Hansberry's idea that
the play should evolve from the mother's point of view, and wanted that his
character were stronger. However, in the play the heavily built McNeil once
slapped her daughter, Beneatha, in the face and nearly knocked her into the
second row. Raisin was revived in 1981, when Claudia McNeil recreated the
role in the musica abaptation.