“ sparkling new biography by the acclaimed literary biographer Charles J. He captures Hansberry in her full complexity.”

“In his engrossing biography, Shields provides a contextualized portrait of Hansberry, the first Black woman to write a play staged on Broadway.…Shields has a knack for illuminating the lives of writers, and through his deep research, how Hansberry’s play about a Black Chicago family in the 1950s is so resonant today. “Shields’s portrait is the latest attempt to expand our sense of the personal struggle behind the public figure, and to illuminate the many contradictions that sought to live and work through….Shields’s biography lays out a more complex narrative.” “ well-researched account of Hansberry’s life and conscientious summaries of her literary and political work…Shields paints an evocative portrait of Hansberry’s childhood in Chicago… fills a niche on the growing shelf of books devoted to her by offering a solid introduction to this important American artist and social critic.” The Christian Science Monitor’s “10 best books of January” Lit Hub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2022”īook Marks’s “The Best Reviewed Books of the Week,” 1/21/22 Playbill ’s “7 Theatre Books to Read This Winter” This dramatic telling of a passionate life-a very American life through self-reinvention-uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions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.įeatured in The New York Times’s “16 New Books Coming in January” Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today. 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. 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.Ĭharles J. 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.

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

Author a raisin in the sun