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Author Biography:

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) Deeply committed to the Black struggle for equality and human rights, Lorraine Hansberry's brilliant career as a writer was cut short by her death when she was only 35. A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Hansberry was the youngest and the first black writer to receive this award. Hansberry's purpose was to show "the many gradations in even one Negro family." The characters suffer, hope, dream, and triumph over the enormous barriers erected by the dominant culture. Celebrated drama critic Brook Atkinson wrote: "She has told the inner as well as the outer truths about a Negro family in Chicago. The play has vigor as well as veracity and is likely to destroy the complacency of anyone who sees it." The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window is concerned with the moral problems of a Jewish intellectual in Greenwich Village. In discussing the play, Hansberry wrote: "The silhouette of the Western intellectual poised in hesitation before the flames of involvement was an accurate symbolism of my closest friends." More...

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/Authors/LorraineHansberry.html (Voices from the Gaps)