Lorraine hansberry biography videos

African-American playwright and author (1930–1965)

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and writer.^[1] She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway.

Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so.^[2] Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S.

Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.

After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where