In 1959, 28-year-old Chicago native Lorraine Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for her first play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry (1930–1965) was the first African-American playwright to win a Critics’ Circle Award, and A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by an African- American woman to be produced on Broadway. The play focuses on the struggle of a black working class family for a better life in 1950s Chicago. The title of the play is taken from Langston Hughes’s famous poem “Harlem.”
This spring, A Raisin in the Sun returns to Broadway in a production starring Denzel Washington. To celebrate this revival, The New York Public Library presents materials from the Lorraine Hansberry Papers held by NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
