THE STORY OF LORRAINE HANSBERRY

 

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born at Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago on May 19, 1930. She was the youngest of four children. Her father was Carl Augustus Hansberry, a Chicago real estate broker; her mother was Nannie Louise Perry, a driving school teacher, and ward committeewoman. She decided in 1950 to move to New York, where she studied African history at the Jefferson School of Social Science with W.E.B. DuBois as professor and began writing for a newspaper founded by Paul Robeson, called "Freedom". Lorraine Hansberry completed her first play, originally titled "The Crystal Stair" in 1957. Langston Hughes’s poem Harlem inspired Hansberry to retitle it "A Raisin in the Sun". The New York Drama Critics Circle awarded Raisin... 'Best Play' and was also nominated for four Tony Awards. Lorraine met her husband, Robert Nemiroff, a music publisher and songwriter, and that they spent the night before their wedding (June 20th, 1953) protesting the execution of the Rosenbergs. They later divorced in the year 1962, however, they still maintained a business relationship with each other. Two years later 1964, one of her plays “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” opened, although sadly that was the same year Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She died on January 12, 1965. After her death, Robert adapted a collection of her writing and interviews in To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which opened off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre and ran for eight months.