Lorraine Hansberry
Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first drama by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway and the first with a black director, Lloyd Richards.
Hasnberry raised funds to produce A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway in 1958. In 1959, it opened on Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, to great acclaim. The play explored the emotional conflicts within a working-class black family in Chicago in the 1950s as well as race. A Raisin in the Sun won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, making Hansberry the first African American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so, at the age of 29.
