A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

Never before, the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage, observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.

Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of black America--and changed American theater forever. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem Harlem, which warns that a dream deferred might dry up/like a raisin in the sun.

The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun, said The New York Times. It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic. This Modern Library edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff.

Lorraine Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year at the age of twenty-nine, making her the youngest American, fifth woman, and first black playwright to do so. Her novel A Raisin in the Sun has been published and produced in more than 30 countries, and her film adaptation was nominated for Best Screenplay by New York critics and won a Cannes Film Festival Award. Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer at the age of thirty-four, during the run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Her renown has only grown in the years since her death. To Be Young, Talented, and Black, a dramatic biography of the writer told in her own words, was the longest-running Off-Broadway drama of 1969, and has been recorded, filmed, and expanded into a book, as well as touring an unprecedented forty states and two hundred universities.

During the 25th anniversary stage staging of A Raisin in the Sun by the Roundabout Theatre in New York City in 1986, the play was universally regarded as one of the greatest American classics. The PBS American Playhouse TV adaptation of the 25th-anniversary version garnered one of the greatest viewing crowds in PBS history when it premiered in 1990. Les Blancs, her final play, which was produced posthumously on Broadway and subsequently in notable regional theaters, has been acclaimed as her best by a number of critics.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780679755333
ISBN 10	0679755330
Title	A Raisin in the Sun
Author	Lorraine Hansberry
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2004-11-29
Number of pages	160
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable