A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry

If there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle lacks nobility....

He is the last Jewish patriot manning his rifle at Warsaw; he is that young girl who swam into sharks to save a people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all those things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that it is in his eyes.

-Lorraine Hansberry comments on A Raisin in the Sun and her decision to write about a man like Walter in her essay "An Author's Reflections: Walter Lee Younger, Willy Lowman, and He Who Must Live" (1959).

I first became interested in A Raisin in the Sun after being assigned to read the play for an undergraduate course on 20th Century American Drama. I had previously read the Langston Hughes poem from which Hansberry gets her title. Right away I was interested in the play. The play's setting and the importance it places on money, frequently naming specific amounts, reminded me of Richard Wright's book Native Son.

I believe that Loraine Hansberry's play is an important part of the chain of black literary history. She has produced a work that is as important today as it was when it was first produced. This may explain why rapper P. Diddy chose to star as Walter Lee Younger in a current production of the play. What has kept the play current is the accurate protrayal of the difficulties many blacks experience with housing discrimination an issue that remains a problem to this day in America.