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.”
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A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry (1959) · 151pages · Contemporary / Post-War American Drama · 9 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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 n...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Working-class Chicago Black vernacular with generational registers — Mama's Southern-tinged cadences, Walter Lee's street-inflected idiom, Beneatha's educated code-switching
Narrator: A Raisin in the Sun has no narrator — it is pure drama. But Hansberry's stage directions function as novelistic prose...
Figurative Language: Moderate
Historical Context
Post-WWII America — the Great Migration, restrictive housing covenants, early Civil Rights era (1950s): The Younger family's poverty is not accidental — it is the product of specific post-war policies. The FHA backed mortgages for white families in new suburbs and redlined Black neighborhoods. The GI...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Walter Lee says 'I been wrong, Mama. I been doing to you what the rest of the world been doing to me.' Why does Hansberry give him this line — and what does it mean for the play's view of how oppression moves through families?
- Karl Lindner never uses a slur, never threatens violence, and frames his offer as helping the Youngers. Is his racism more or less dangerous for being polite? What does the play's treatment of Lindner say about how discrimination operates?
- The play's title comes from Langston Hughes's poem 'Harlem (A Dream Deferred)': 'What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?' Which character best embodies each possibility Hughes describes — dry, fester, stink, crust, sag, or explode?
- Beneatha rejects George Murchison's assimilationism but has not yet decided to follow Asagai to Nigeria. What is Hansberry saying by leaving Beneatha's choice unresolved at the play's end?
- Mama tends a houseplant through the entire play, and the final image is her picking it up as she leaves the apartment. What has the plant represented at each stage of the play? How does its meaning accumulate?
Notable Quotes
“I'm thirty-five years old; I been looking forward to that for most of my life.”
“That money belongs to be paid for Bennie's schooling and the rest of it is for me to use as I see fit.”
“In my mother's house there is still God.”
Why Read This
Because A Raisin in the Sun answers a question American literature usually avoids: what does the American Dream look like from inside a family it was never designed to include? At 151 pages of pure dialogue, it's one of the fastest reads in the ca...