What we’re reading: This is the authoritative biography of Chicago’s Lorraine Hansberry we were missing
CHICAGO — I’ve been reading about Lorraine Hansberry. After a long time of not reading very much at all about Lorraine Hansberry. There just wasn’t that much out there about her to read. Her work is (still) not in the Library of America, and even her papers were not generally available to scholars until a couple of decades ago. So there were few major biographies or revelations. Until about ...
CHICAGO — I’ve been reading about Lorraine Hansberry.
After a long time of not reading very much at all about Lorraine Hansberry. There just wasn’t that much out there about her to read. Her work is (still) not in the Library of America, and even her papers were not generally available to scholars until a couple of decades ago. So there were few major biographies or revelations. Until about five years ago, the Chicago author of “A Raisin in the Sun” (and many lesser-known plays and writings) was a literary question mark, a figure of monumental importance — “Raisin in the Sun” is routinely considered a demarcation line in the representation of Black figures in America art — whose life and output appeared to begin and end with a
