Raisin in the Sun, A

A Raisin in the Sun, the landmark play written by Lorraine Hansberry, opened on Broadway on March 11, 1959. It was Broadway's first play written by an African American woman and the first directed by an African American. It was also the first play written by a black American to win the Best Play of the Year Award from the New York Drama Critics Circle. The original production ran for more than a year, playing 530 performances. Weaving a universal tale of a family seeking to realize its dreams of social equality, A Raisin in the Sun has come to occupy a hallowed space in the African American canon. Hansberry depicts the basic middle-class aspirations of blacks and whites as basically the same, while strongly embracing pan-Africanist and protofeminist ideologies. The title is taken from Langston Hughes's 1951 poem “Harlem.”

Set in Chicago's South Side, sometime between World War II and the late 1950s, A Raisin in the Sun chronicles the Younger family as they grapple with the receipt and subsequent loss of a $10,000 insurance check. The close-knit clan—comprising Walter Lee; his stalwart mother, Lena; his patient wife, Ruth; his ambitious sister, Beneatha; and his adolescent son, Travis—shares a stifling, cramped two-bedroom fat. Trapped in a cycle of poverty, dead-end jobs, and missed opportunities, Lena contends that utilizing the windfall to purchase a new home in an all-white neighborhood and pay for medical school for Beneatha are the best ways to ameliorate her family's quality of life. Conflict ensues when the Youngers disagree about how best to spend the money: on Walter Lee's ill-conceived scheme to purchase a liquor store or on Beneatha's unconventional aspiration to become a surgeon. Karl Lindner, a representative from Clybourne Park, the all-white neighborhood where the Youngers plan to move, offers to pay [Page 1805]the family not to move there. Walter Lee claims his place as head of his family when he explains to Lindner that his family is willing to endure racism for its shot at the American Dream.

The general plot was inspired by actual events from Hansberry's childhood in Chicago. Born on May 19, 1930, she was introduced to the poetry of African Americans at an early age, with the works of Countee Cullen, Waring Cuney, and Langston Hughes bearing a special influence. In 1940, when she was only 10, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Hansberry v. Lee, in which her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, contested a restrictive covenant that limited the real estate that African Americans could purchase in Chicago. The family endured violent and dehumanizing treatment at the hands of their neighbors while they inhabited the suburban home in a previously all-white neighborhood.