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).

Hansberry's play was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway.
As a young man Rapper TuPac Shakur played the role of Travis in a production of A Raisin in the Sun.
The play was first performed on Broadway in 1959.
The original production was directed by Lloyd Richards.
Original productions of the play and printed editions of the text deleted scenes and removed lines from Hansberry's original artistic work.
Among the scenes deleted from the 1959 production of the play are Travis' story about killing the rat downstairs, Beneatha's changing her hairstyle, and a large chunk of the last conversation between Asagai and Beneatha.
Lorraine Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff who was the executive producer of the 1989 television revival of Lorraine's play.
Lorraine Hansberry's father was a professor of African Studies at Howard University.
Before becoming a dramatist Lorraine Hansberry was a writer and associate editor for Paul Robeson's Freedom.
Shashin Desai the artistic director for a recent production of Raisin, a musical based on Hansberry's play, remembers what originally attracted him to the script, "It was one of the first shows I saw as a foreign student in the '60s. I was so taken by this man's [Walter Lee Younger] plight. I never saw it as a black play or a white play or a yellow play."
"Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes and life, and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are -- and just as mixed up -- but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks -people who are the very essence of human dignity." - Lorraine Hansberry describes A Raisin in the Sun to her mother.
"When I first met Lorraine, she was, like, wired. You could feel the currents coming out of her. Such an exciting person -- and gorgeous." - theatrical director Billie Allen on first meeting Lorainne Hansberry.
"In order for a person to bear his life, he needs a valid re-creation of that life... This is why 'Raisin in the Sun' meant so much to black people. . . . In the theater, a current flowed back and forth between the audience and the actors, flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood -- as we say, testifying." -Novelist and essayist James Baldwin on the importance of A Raisin in the Sun