A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
“A Black family in 1950s Chicago fights over a $10,000 insurance check — and every argument is really about whether Black Americans are allowed to dream.”
At a Glance
The Younger family of Chicago's South Side receives a $10,000 life insurance check after the death of Walter Lee Sr. Walter Lee Jr. wants to invest in a liquor store, his mother Lena wants to buy a house, and his sister Beneatha wants medical school tuition. Lena buys a house in the all-white Clybourne Park neighborhood. A white homeowners' association representative named Karl Lindner offers to buy the family out before they move in. Walter Lee, who has been swindled out of his share of the money, is tempted to accept — but in the play's climactic moment, refuses. The family moves.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway. Won the 1959 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, defeating Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. Changed the representational landscape of American theater: for the first time, a Black American family was on a Broadway stage not as comedy, not as social problem, but as fully realized human beings with interior lives, philosophical arguments, and the full weight of the American Dream pressing on them. The title comes from Langston Hughes's poem 'Harlem (A Dream Deferred)' — Hansberry's choice of epigraph announced that this was a political act, not just a domestic drama.
Diction Profile
Working-class Chicago Black vernacular with generational registers — Mama's Southern-tinged cadences, Walter Lee's street-inflected idiom, Beneatha's educated code-switching
Moderate