Lorraine V. Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

Lorraine V. Hansberry

Author Lorraine Hansberry, who is considered one of the Great American authors, wrote during the Modernist period. She wrote “A Raisin in the Sun” in 1959. In this work, we can see evidence of the characteristics, themes and style identified with the Modernist movement which was extant in American letters between 1850’s and after WWII. Lorraine Hansberry wrote during this time period of American literature, and such, remains one of the most identifiable and iconic writers of her time.

Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois. Her father was a real estate broker and her mother was a school teacher. In 1938, Hansberry’s family moved to a white neighborhood, her and her family soon ended up getting attacked by their white neighbors. The case made it to the Supreme Court as “Hansberry v.

While in school, Hansberry changed her major from painting to writing, after a couple of years she decided to drop out and move to New York . She attended the New School for Social Research. During a protest against racial discrimination at New York University, she met Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer. They both got married on June 20, 1956 in Chicago. Hansberry later began a play she called “The Crystal Stair”, from Langston Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son” she later retitled it as “A Raisin in the Sun”. Hansberry was an atheist and she believed that gaining civil rights in the United States and obtaining independence in colonial Africa were two sides of the same coin that presented similar challenges for Africans on both

This Literary Movement is characterized by: World War 1.

Particularly in her work titled “A raisin in the Sun”, we can see a representation of the type of literature written during the Modernist (1960’s) era. “A raisin in the Sun" deals with

• Self-consciousness and irony concerning literary and social convention, admitted artifice in