Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was 29 years old when A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway on March 11, 1959, making her the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the youngest American playwright to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. The play — about a Black family's struggle to move into a white neighborhood in Chicago — is one of the most performed works in American theater history.

Born in Chicago in 1930, Hansberry grew up in a middle-class family that was deeply involved in civil rights. When she was eight, her father moved the family into a restricted white neighborhood as a deliberate act of resistance. The family endured mob violence — a concrete slab was thrown through their window, nearly hitting young Lorraine. Her father took the case to the Supreme Court and won in Hansberry v. Lee (1940), a landmark housing discrimination case. These experiences directly inspired A Raisin in the Sun.

Hansberry was also a brilliant essayist, activist, and one of the first openly lesbian public intellectuals in America, though this aspect of her identity was largely suppressed during her lifetime. She joined the ancestors from pancreatic cancer at just 34, leaving behind a body of work that, while heartbreakingly small, changed American theater forever. The title of her masterpiece came from a Langston Hughes poem: "What happens to a dream deferred?"