Early Life
The name of the Windy City where Lorraine Hansberry was born.
What is Chicago?
Lorraine Hansberry was the first African American woman to have a play produced on this stage.
What is Broadway?
Lorraine wrote under this pen name for The Ladder, a pioneering lesbian magazine.
This play is about Village intellectuals whose artistic careers are floundering and whose love lives are a mess. In the opening scene, Sidney, a pretentious newspaper editor, advises a protégé to “presume no commitment, disavow all engagement, mock all great expectations”—a succinct summary of the kind of writing that Hansberry despised.
What is The Sign in Sydney Burnstein’s Window?
The name of the university Lorraine Hansberry went to for 2 years. She later dropped out and moved to New York City
What is the University of Wisconsin?
Lorraine Hansberry is deeply involved in this movement.
What is the Civil Rights movement?
For her play "Raisin in the Sun", she became the youngest American playwright and only fifth woman to receive this award as well as a Tony nomination for Best Play.
What is The New York Drama Critics Circle Award?
This play follows the rise and fall and rise again of the Youngers, a Black mid-century family trying to turn its loss into a legacy. Walter Younger, Sr., has died, and the payout from his life-insurance policy promises to transform his family: five people across three generations squeezed into a kitchenette on Chicago’s South Side.
What is A Raisin in the Sun?
This Supreme Court case helped end racially discriminatory covenants in Chicago.
What is Hansberry v. Lee?
Lorraine died at the age of 34 due to this cancer.
What is pancreatic cancer?
This sculpture was made in honor of Hansberry. Hansberry sits in the center surrounded by five chairs that represent her life and works, and invites the public to sit and think with her.
What is To Sit A While by Allison Saar?
This play follows a white Christian mission in a colony about to explode. It confronts the hope and tragedy in Africa during revolution.
What is Les Blancs?
Lorraine Hansberry wrote for this progressive black newspaper from 1950 to 1953.
What is Freedom?
Later in life Lorraine was known for her advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights, writing under this about her own experiences and struggles with sexual identity.
What is a pseudonym?
Her unpublished materials are primarily collected in The Lorraine Hansberry papers at this center.
What is the Schomburg Center for research in black culture?
Due to her untimely passing Lorraine left behind many incomplete plays and film scripts including Toussaint, The Drinking Gourd, What use are Flowers, and this work.
What is Masters of the Dew?