Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Descripción editorial
The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage, by the New York Times bestselling author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee
Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics’ Circle Award.
Charles J. Shields’s authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century’s most admired playwrights examines the parts of Lorraine Hansberry’s life that have escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper-class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband—her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today.
This dramatic telling of a passionate life—a very American life through self-reinvention—uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions about a life not fully described until now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) had "a gift, or maybe an instinct, for engaging with the leading black American playwrights, novelists, activists, and cultural leaders of her day," writes bestseller Shields (Mockingbird) in this well-researched if knotty biography of the playwright. Stating his desire to both understand Hansberry's life in the context of her contemporaries and to show what set her apart, Shields explores her bifurcated youth in Chicago as a child who grew up as the daughter in a wealthy family yet was subjected to racism. Hansberry's father was a slumlord, and Shields shows how an adult Hansberry became deeply attracted to communism and, "despite being an anticapitalist, she enjoyed the cultural and material advantages of an upbringing among the black elite." Shields focuses, too, on the writing and production of Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, which he estimates is up there with The Death of a Salesman as "the most popular work of mid-twentieth-century American theater" and was the high point of Hansberry's tragically short career. Shields, however, can come across as dismissive of his subject, as when he repeatedly trots out (and dwells on) the question of whether Hansberry actually wrote Raisin, but doesn't hazard an answer since "the original manuscript was lost." It's a fine introduction to Hansberry's world, but readers may be left wanting.
