Lady Gregory
Irish playwright, poet, folklorist (1852-1932)
Lorraine Vivian Hansberrywas an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway.
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About the Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Vivian Hansberrywas an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry’s family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she worked with other black intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry also wrote about being a lesbian and the oppression of gay people. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34 during the Broadway run of her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window in 1965. Hansberry inspired the Nina Simone song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”, whose title-line came from Hansberry’s autobiographical play.
7 Quotes by Lorraine Hansberry
- 1.
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
Lorraine HansberryAfrican-American playwright and author (1930-1965)
- 2.
Children see things very well sometimes – and idealists even better.
Lorraine HansberryAfrican-American playwright and author (1930-1965)
- 3.
Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?
Lorraine HansberryAfrican-American playwright and author (1930-1965)
- 4.
There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.
Lorraine HansberryAfrican-American playwright and author (1930-1965)
- 5.
Seems like God don’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams – but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.
Lorraine HansberryAfrican-American playwright and author (1930-1965)
- 6.
A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men – and people in general.
Lorraine HansberryAfrican-American playwright and author (1930-1965)
- 7.
Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.
Lorraine HansberryAfrican-American playwright and author (1930-1965)