A Raisin in the Sun

"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 was a Black activist, artist, public intellectual, and writer. When her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, appeared on Broadway in 1959, she became the youngest American playwright, the fifth woman, and the only African American to date to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play. The play was a landmark and made it impossible for the American stage to ignore African American creativity and subject matter thereafter. On January 12, 1965, during the run of her second Broadway play-The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window-Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer. She was thirty-four. To Be Young, Gifted and Black, an autobiographical portrait in her own words, adapted by her former husband and literary executor, Robert Nemiroff, was posthumously produced in 1969. In 1970, Les Blancs, her play about the inevitability of struggle between colonizers and colonized in Africa and the impending crisis that would surely grow out of it, ran on Broadway to critical acclaim. She wrote numerous articles and essays on literary criticism, racism, sexism, homophobia, world peace, and other social and political issues. Her published writings also include The Drinking Gourd, What Use Are Flowers?, and The Movement. The Lorraine Hansberry Papers are located at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, a division of the New York Public Library. Joi Gresham is literary trustee to the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry, where she oversees the multimedia licensing of Hansberry's works and other intellectual properties. She is the daughter of Jewell Gresham-Nemiroff and Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry's former husband and literary executor. Gresham was a producer of the 2014 Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun with Denzel Washington and the 2023 Broadway revival of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan. She is a writer and editor for print editions of Hansberry's writings. Soyica Diggs Colbert is the Idol Family Professor at Georgetown University. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of the award-winning book Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Colbert's writing has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Public Books, and American Theatre. She was an associate director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. and served as a creative content producer for The Public Theater's audio play shadow/land. She is currently at work on a group biography entitled Freedom's Gate: Live at the New York Nightclub That Shaped the Civil Rights Movement.