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.”
A Raisin in the Sun— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Lorraine Hansberry · Published 1959· Era: Contemporary / Post-War American Drama·151 pages
Themes explored: american-dream, race, family, class, gender, dignity, housing
About Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) was born in Chicago to a middle-class Black family who had fought their way into a white neighborhood. In 1937, her father Carl Hansberry purchased a house in a white South Side neighborhood. A white homeowners' association obtained a court order to evict them under Illinois's racially restrictive covenant laws. The family refused to leave. Carl Hansberry took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court; Hansberry v. Lee (1940) was decided in the family's favor on procedural grounds — it did not overturn restrictive covenants, but it was a significant civil rights victory. Lorraine was seven years old. The family received death threats and had a concrete block thrown through their window. She grew up understanding that a home was a political act. At twenty-eight, Hansberry became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, which A Raisin in the Sun won in 1959 over Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. She was twenty-nine. She died of pancreatic cancer at thirty-four, in 1965, the year before Black Power movements transformed the conversation her play had begun.
Life → Text Connections
How Lorraine Hansberry's real experiences shaped specific elements of A Raisin in the Sun.
The Hansberry family was physically threatened and legally attacked for moving into a white Chicago neighborhood; Hansberry v. Lee went to the Supreme Court
The Younger family's purchase of the Clybourne Park house and Karl Lindner's visit from the Improvement Association
The play is not a cautionary fable. It is autobiography. Hansberry knew exactly what awaited the Youngers in Clybourne Park because she had lived it at age seven.
Hansberry's father Carl, despite his legal victory, died in Mexico City in 1946 after effectively being exiled from American political life — he was planning to move permanently to Mexico when he died
Big Walter Sr., who worked himself to death before seeing his dream materialize
The dead father is the play's moral engine. Big Walter's sacrifice is what the insurance check represents — and what Walter Lee is being asked to honor.
Hansberry was deeply involved in civil rights circles, knew Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois, and wrote for the Black radical newspaper Freedom
Beneatha's political conversations with Asagai, the critique of assimilationism, the African identity threads
Hansberry was not a liberal integrationist. She was a radical who understood that housing rights were only one front. Beneatha's arguments with Asagai reflect debates Hansberry was having in her own life.
Hansberry was a lesbian in an era when that identity could not be publicly claimed; her marriage to Robert Nemiroff was one of the era's necessary compromises
Ruth's pragmatic silences, Beneatha's refusal of conventional female ambition, the play's sympathy for those constrained by the roles assigned to them
The play's attention to the cost of self-suppression — and the dignity of insisting on being seen — carries a dimension critics have only recently begun to recover.
Historical Era
Post-WWII America — the Great Migration, restrictive housing covenants, early Civil Rights era (1950s)
How the Era Shapes the Book
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 Bill built a white middle class and largely excluded Black veterans. The Black Belt of Chicago's South Side was deliberately created by real estate practices that confined Black families to overcrowded, deteriorating housing stock. Walter Lee's position as a chauffeur and the family's inability to own anything reflects not individual failure but the outcome of deliberate policy. Hansberry knew this and built it into the play's architecture.
Why A Raisin in the Sun Matters Historically
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.
- First play by a Black woman produced on Broadway (1959)
- First Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play
- First major American drama to make housing discrimination its central conflict rather than its background condition
- Introduced the phrase 'A Raisin in the Sun' — from Langston Hughes's 'Harlem' — into permanent cultural vocabulary
Has been challenged in schools for language, particularly the use of period-appropriate racial slurs and the portrayal of abortion (Ruth's pregnancy and her decision). Also challenged in conservative districts for its implicit critique of housing segregation as a systemic issue rather than individual prejudice. Ironically, the play's optimistic ending has been used to dismiss these challenges: 'The family wins — what's the problem?' The problem, of course, is everything the play says before that ending.