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Lorraine Hansberry Biography Essay

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Lorraine Hansberry was an extraordinary woman, born May 19, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois. According to Lorraine Hansberry Biography, “Hansberry was the first African American playwright, as well as the youngest American to win a New York Critics award.” As time went on, her family moved into a white neighborhood and was cruelly harmed, her life was not easy growing up. Even though they had a hard time in their neighborhood they refused to leave until a court order made them. This later ended up in the Supreme Court as Hansberry V. Lee, making restrictive covenants illegal. As she got older she broke the family tradition by enrolling to University of Wisconsin instead of Southern black colleges. She then changed her major from painting to writing, …show more content…

By 1956 was fully devoted to writing, a year later she became a member of the Daughters of Bilitis, according to Lorraine Hansberry Biography, “she contributed letters to their magazine, The Ladder, about feminism and homophobia. Her lesbian identity was exposed in the articles, but she wrote under her initials, L.H., for fear of discrimination.” In the same she also wrote another play called The Crystal Stair, about struggling black family living in Chicago, eventually the name changed to A Raisin in the Sun, which was a line from one of her poems. According to Lorraine Hansberry Biography, “The play opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, and was a great success, having a run of 530 performances. It was the first play produced on Broadway by an African-American woman, the film version of A Raisin in the Sun was completed in 1961, starring Sidney Poitier, and received an award at the Cannes Film Festival.” Soon after her A Raisin in the Sun was on Broadway, another one of her plays was released on Broadway, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, to unenthusiastic

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