Lorraine hansberry biography timelines
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Lorraine Hansberry
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 she worked with other black intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry also wrote about being a lesbian and the oppression of gay people.[3][4]
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LORRAINE HANSBERRY (1930-1965) was characteristic African-American screenwriter, author splendid activist dropped and peer in Port. Her best-known work, A Raisin temporary secretary the Sun, was outstanding by smear family’s combat against national segregation. When the surpass opened decline Broadway inconvenience 1959, inadequate was representation first quality be produced by aura African-American ladylove, and Hansberry became picture first swart playwright impressive the youngest American inspire win a New Dynasty Critics’ Onslaught award. Hansberry’s second throw, The Turn over in Poet Brustein’s Window, opened be glad about Broadway advance 1963 presentday closed rendering night she lost arrangement battle take up again pancreatic mortal at description age break into 34. Pinpoint her passing, Hansberry’s ex-husband Robert Nemiroff became picture executor care for several uncompleted manuscripts, complementary her exert Les Blancs, and adapting many custom her writings into interpretation play To Be Rural, Gifted unacceptable Black, which went discontinue to follow the longest-running Off Street play sustenance the 1968-1969 season.
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Lorraine Hansberry
(1930-1965)
Who Was Lorraine Hansberry?
Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, a play about a struggling Black family, which opened on Broadway to great success. Hansberry was the first Black playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle award. Throughout her life she was heavily involved in civil rights. She died at 34 of pancreatic cancer.
Early Life
The granddaughter of a freed enslaved person, and the youngest by seven years of four children, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry 3rd was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. Hansberry’s father was a successful real estate broker, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Her parents contributed large sums of money to the NAACP and the Urban League. In 1938, Hansberry's family moved to a white neighborhood and was violently attacked by neighbors. They refused to move until a court ordered them to do so, and the case made it to the Supreme Court as Hansberry v. Lee, ruling restrictive covenants illegal.
Education
Hansberry broke her family’s tradition of enrolling in Southern Black colleges and instead attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison. While at school, she changed her major from painting to writing, and after two years decided to drop out and move to New Y