Works by
Lorraine Hansberry
(aka Lorraine Vivian Hansberry)
(Playwright, Writer)
[1930 - 1965]

Books

• A Raisin in the Sun (1959) -- Winner 1959 New York Drama Critics Circle Award
  A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life.
  Movie (1959),   DVD  VHS  Directed by Daniel Petrie, starring Claudia McNeil, Diana Sands, Ivan Dixon, John Fiedler, Louis Gossett, Ruby Dee, and Sidney Poitier

• A Raisin in the Sun (1960)
  Screenplay

• The Drinking Gourd (1960)
  See Les Blancs

• The Movement:  Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964)

• The Sign in Brustein's Window: A Dram in Two Acts (1965)

• To Be Young, Gifted and Black: An Informal Autobiography (1970), Adapted by Robert Nemiroff
  In her first play, the now-classic A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry introduced the lives of ordinary African Americans into our national theatrical repertory. Now, Hansberry tells her own life story in an autobiography that rings with the voice of its creator.

• Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays (1994)
  Here are Lorraine Hansberry's last three plays -- Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? -- representing the capstone of her achievement.

• A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1995)
  By the time of her death thirty years ago, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of black family life in the inner city. Barely five years later, with The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Hansberry gave us an unforgettable portrait of a man struggling with his individual fate in an age of racial and social injustice. These two plays remain milestones in the American theater, remarkable not only for their historical value but for their continued ability to engage the imagination and the heart.

Audio

• Lorraine Hansberry Collection (2001)
  Lorraine Hansberry wrote of Black consciousness before it was fashionable, but she bequeathed to all of us a legacy astounding in its richness and relevancy. Few writers, black or white, are more relevant to present-day America than Lorraine Hansberry.
  
  Here, for the first time, Caedmon has gathered many of her plays, interviews, and speeches into one unforgettable collection.
  
  A Raisin in the Sun: an emotionally lacerating landmark of modem American theatre. A full-cast production starring Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis.
  
  To Be Young, Gifted and Black: a glowing, vibrant, searing and, at the same time, redemptively joyous self-portrait. A full-cast production starring James Earl Jones.
  
  Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: seven interviews and speeches, recorded between 1959 and 1964, that range in topic from integration to backlash to the greatness and limitations of AfricanAmerican leadership.

See also:

• Raisin (1978) by Judd Woldin
  A play based on Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun"

• They Found a Way: Lorraine Hansberry (1978) by Catherine Scheader
  A biography of the playwright who was the first black person and the youngest American to receive the best play of the year award.

• Plays on a Human Theme (1979) with Cy Groves (Editor), Jerome Lawrence, Paddy Chayefsky, and Robert E. Lee

• The Crisis of Feminist Criticism: A Case Study of Lorraine Hansberry's Feminine Triads in Raisin and Sign (1982) by Maria Mootry

• United States Authors Series - Lorraine Hansberry (1984) by Cheney Ann
  Twayne's United States Authors Series

• Hansberry's Drama: Commitment and Complexity (1993) by Steven A. Carter

• Lorraine Hansberry: Dramatist and Activist (1994) by Fredrick McKissack and Pat McKissack

• The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (1995) by Ben Keppel
  Thirty years after the greatest legislative triumphs of the civil rights movement, overcoming racism remains what Martin Luther King, Jr., once called America's unfinished "work of democracy." Why this remains true is the subject of Ben Keppel's The Work of Democracy. By carefully tracing the public lives of Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, and Lorraine Hansberry, Keppel illuminates how the mainstream media selectively appropriated the most challenging themes, ideas, and goals of the struggle for racial equality so that difficult questions about the relationship between racism and American democracy could be softened, if not entirely evaded.
  
  Keppel traces the circumstances and cultural politics that transformed each individual into a participant-symbol of the postwar struggle for equality. Here we see how United Nations ambassador Ralph Bunche, the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, came to symbolize the American Dream while Bunche's opposition to McCarthyism was ignored. The emergence of psychologist and educator Kenneth B. Clark marked the ascendancy of the child and the public school as the leading symbols of the civil rights movement. Yet Keppel details how Clark's blueprint for "community action" was thwarted by machine politics. Finally, the author chronicles the process by which the "American Negro" became an "African American" by considering the career of playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Keppel reveals how both the journalistic and the academic establishment rewrote the theme of her prize-winning play A Raisin in the Sun to conform to certain well-worn cultural conventions and the steps Hansberry took to reclaim the message of her classic.
  
  The Work of Democracy uses biography in innovative ways to reflect on how certain underlying cultural assumptions and values of American culture simultaneously advanced and undermined the postwar struggle for racial equality.

• Lorraine Hansberry: A Research and Production Sourcebook  (1997) by Richard M. Leeson
  Born in the Southside of Chicago in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry and her family moved to a large house in a white neighborhood in 1938. In order to live there, her father had to fight a civil rights case in the Supreme Court against segregationists. Her experiences with racial discrimination fueled her strong commitment to social justice and inspired her works. In 1959, her first-produced play, A Raisin in the Sun, met the enthusiastic praise of Broadway critics and audiences alike. It was the first and longest running play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. When it won the New York Drama Circle Award for the best new drama that year, Hansberry became the first black woman and the youngest recipient to earn that honor. She died just a few years later, in 1965, without ever fully realizing her potential. This reference book is a guide to her career. The volume begins with a chronology that recounts the major events in Hansberry's brief but influential life. Entries are then listed for her plays, including A Raisin in the Sun (1959), The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964), To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969), Les Blancs (1970), The Drinking Gourd (1972), What Use Are Flowers (1972), and the unfinished Toussaint (1986). Each entry includes a plot summary, critical commentary, and production information, when available. An annotated bibliography of works by and about Hansberry, along with a list of unpublished material and archival sources, complete the volume.

• The Importance of Lorraine Hansberry (1997) by Janet Tripp
  Examines the life and work of this African American playwright and social activist who received great recognition at an early age.

• Black Women's Writing: Quest for Identity in the Plays of Lorraine Hansberry and Ntozake Shange (1997) by Y. S Sharadha

• Lorraine Hansberry: Playwright and Voice of Justice (1998) by Catherine Scheader
  A biography of the playwright who was the first black person and the youngest American to receive the New York Drama Critics' award for the best play of the year.

• Understanding A Raisin in the Sun (1998) by Lynn Domina
  A Raisin in the Sun is the first play by a black woman to be produced in a Broadway theater. First performed in 1959, before the civil rights and women's movements came to the fore, it raises issues of segregation, family strife, and relationships between men and women that are both representative of the time and timeless in their universality. This interdisciplinary collection of commentary and forty-five primary documents will enrich the reader's understanding of the historical and social context of the play. A wide variety of primary materials sheds light on integration and segregation in the 1950s and 1960s; relationships between African Americans and Africans; relationships between men and women within African American culture; Chicago as a literary setting for the play; and contemporary race relations in the 1990s.

• Young, Black, and Determined: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (1998) by Fredrick McKissack and Pat McKissack
  A biography of the black playwright who received great recognition for her work at an early age.

• Lorraine Hansberry (1999) by Susan Sinnott
  In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry became the first black woman playwright to be produced on Broadway. Her play, A Raisin in the Sun -- based loosely on the experiences of her own family in Chicago -- was an overnight sensation with both black and white audiences. In the wake of its phenomenal success, Hansberry became a spokesperson for black Americans during the 1960s civil rights movement. Then in 1964, just before the Broadway opening of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Her brilliant career as a writer was cut short a year later, when she died at age 34.

• In Search of a Model for African-American Drama (2000) by Philip Uko Effiong
  In Search of a Model for African-American Drama - A study of Selected plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange, is a comparative study of how these three dramatists seek and devise new models to address the specific conditions of Blacks in America. Each writer relies on a different approach, each powerful, yet apparently contradictory. The author examines the dramatists' work in detail, exploring common and contrasting themes and models.

• Readings on a Raisin in the Sun (2000), Bonnie Szumski, Bruno Leone, and Lawrence Kappel, eds.

• Lorraine Hansberry (2001) by Susan Sinnott

• A Reader's Guide to Lorraine Hansberry's a Raisin in the Sun (2007 release) by Pamela Loos