Lorraine Hansberry, at twenty-nine, became the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best Play of the Year. Her A Raisin in the Sun has since been published and produced in some 30 countries, while her film adaptation was nominated by the New York critics for the Best Screenplay and received a Cannes Film Festival Award. At thirty-four, during the run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer. In the years since her death, her stature has continued to grow. To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a dramatic portrait of the playwright in her own words, was the longest-running Off-Broadway drama of 1969, and has been recorded, filmed, and published in expanded book form, and has toured an unprecedented forty states and two hundred colleges. In 1986, following the stage production of the 25th anniversary of A Raisin in the Sun by the Roundabout Theatre in New York City, the play was widely acclaimed as in the foremost ranks of American classics. In 1990, the PBS American Playhouse TV adaptation of the 25th-anniversary version had one of the highest viewing audiences in PBS history. Les Blancs, her last play—posthumously performed on Broadway and recently in prominent regional theaters—has been hailed by a number of critics as her best.
A Raisin in the Sun
Paperback
(Anniversary Rev)
- ISBN-13: 9780573614637
- Publisher: Samuel French, Incorporated
- Publication date: 02/10/2010
- Edition description: Anniversary Rev
- Pages: 162
- Sales rank: 5,737
- Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.35(d)
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When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever."The New York Times.
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The place: a tenement flat in Southside, Chicago. The time: post—World War II. Lena Younger, the strong-willed matriarch, is the glue that holds together the Younger family. Walter Lee is her married, thirty-something son who, along with his wife and sister, lives in his mother’s apartment. He is short on meeting responsibilities but long on dreams. Beneatha (that’s right, Beneatha) is Waiter’s sister—an upwardly mobile college student who plans to attend medical school.
Mama Lena is due a check from her late husband’s insurance, and Waiter Lee is ready to invest it in a liquor store. The money represents his opportunity to assert his manhood. It will bring the jump start he needs to set his life right. Beneatha tells him that it’s "mama’s money to do with as she pleases," and that she doesn’t really expect any for her schooling. However, Mama wants to use her new money for a new beginning—in a new house, in a new neighborhood (white).
Walter cries, and Mama relents. She refrains from paying cash for the house and places a deposit instead, giving Waiter the difference to share equally between his investment and Beneatha’s college fund. Walter squanders the entire amount. Meanwhile, Mama receives a call from the neighborhood "welcome committee" hoping to dissuade the family from moving in.
While roundly criticized for being politically accommodating to whites, Raisin accurately reflected the aspirations of a newly nascent black middle class.
John Chapman, New York News
“An honest, intelligible, and moving experience.”
Walter Kerr, New York Herald Tribune
“Miss Hansberry has etched her characters with understanding, and told her story with dramatic impact. She has a keen sense of humor, an ear for accurate speech and compassion for people.”
Robert Coleman, New York Mirror
“A Raisin in the Sun has vigor as well as veracity.”
Brooks Atkinson, New York Times
“It is honest drama, catching up real people. . . . It will make you proud of human beings.”
Frank Aston, New York World-Telegram & Sun
“A wonderfully emotional evening.”
John McClain, New York Journal American