Biography
Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on 19 May 1930, the youngest of four children of a schoolteacher and a real-estate broker; her family's legal fight over a house in a until-then all-white neighbourhood reached the US Supreme Court in 1940 as Hansberry v. Lee. She studied at the University of Wisconsin and at the New School in New York, and from 1951 wrote for the newspaper Freedom, co-founded by Paul Robeson, covering decolonisation and women's rights. In 1959 her play A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Her second major play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, closed on the night of her death. Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer in New York on 12 January 1965, aged 34.
On Stagelog
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