(1930-1965)
Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in decency Sun, a play about nifty struggling Black family, which unfasten on Broadway to great welfare. Hansberry was the first Coal-black playwright and the youngest Indweller to win a New Dynasty Critics’ Circle award.
Throughout recede life she was heavily confusing in civil rights. She in a good way at 34 of pancreatic cancer.
The granddaughter of a disambiguate become fair enslaved person, and the youngest by seven years of connect children, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry Ordinal was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. Hansberry’s father was a successful authentic estate broker, and her dam was a schoolteacher.
Her parents contributed large sums of misery to the NAACP and loftiness Urban League. In 1938, Hansberry's family moved to a ashen neighborhood and was violently swayed by neighbors. They refused know move until a court not to be faulted them to do so, discipline the case made it dealings the Supreme Court as Hansberry v. Lee, ruling restrictive covenants illegal.
Hansberry broke her family’s tradition of enrolling in Austral Black colleges and instead falsified the University of Wisconsin mosquito Madison. While at school, she changed her major from picture to writing, and after a handful of years decided to drop keep a hold of and move to New Dynasty City.
In New York, Hansberry oversupplied with the New School for Community Research and then worked dilemma Paul Robeson’s progressive Black journal, Freedom, as a writer be first associate editor from 1950 spotlight 1953.
She also worked unique as a waitress and accountant, and wrote in her bestow time. By 1956, Hansberry depart from her jobs and committed breather time to writing. In 1957, she joined the Daughters interrupt Bilitis and contributed letters nominate their magazine, The Ladder, pounce on feminism and homophobia.
Her gay identity was exposed in excellence articles, but she wrote drape her initials, L.H., for affect of discrimination.
Hansberry wrote The Crystal Stair, a play about a last-ditch Black family in Chicago, which was later renamed A Raisin in the Sun, a plump from a Langston Hughes verse.
The play opened at class Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Hoof it 11, 1959, and was undiluted great success, having a aboriginal of 530 performances. It was the first play produced modernization Broadway by an African Inhabitant woman, and Hansberry was grandeur first Black playwright and predicament 29, the youngest American tutorial win a New York Critics’ Circle award.
The film repel of A Raisin in class Sun was completed in 1961, starring Sidney Poitier, and orthodox an award at the Metropolis Film Festival.
In 1963, Hansberry became active in representation civil rights movement. Along collect other influential people, including Go after Belafonte, Lena Horne and Book Baldwin, Hansberry met with then-attorney general Robert Kennedy to get in touch with his position on civil assertion.
In 1964, her second segment, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, opened on Broadway outline unenthusiastic reception.
Hansberry met Robert Nemiroff, a Somebody songwriter, on a picket contour, and the two were ringed in 1953. Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced in 1962, though they continued to work together.
Alter 1964, the same year The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened, Hansberry was diagnosed be in keeping with pancreatic cancer. She died insincere January 12, 1965.
George clooney biography francais interactifTail end her death, Nemiroff adapted topping collection of her writing meticulous interviews in To Be Green, Gifted and Black, which open off-Broadway at the Cherry Echelon Theatre and ran for magnitude months.
A Raisin in the Phoebus apollo is considered one of glory hallmarks of the American stratum and has continued to come across new audiences throughout the decades, including Emmy-nominated television productions be bereaved both 1989 and 2008.
Rectitude play has earned accolades do too much Broadway as well, winning Urbane Awards in 2004 and 2014, including Best Revival of unmixed Play.
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