Lorraine Vivian Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun exploded onto American theater scene on March 11, 1959, with such force that it garnered for the then-unknown black female playwright the Drama Circle Critics Award for 1958-59 — in spite of such luminous competition as Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet, and Archibald MacLeish's J.B.
Since its Broadway debut, Raisin has been translated into over thirty languages, including the language of the eastern German Sorbische minority, and has been produced in such culturally diverse places as China, the former Czechoslovakia, England, France, and the former Soviet Union. Its universal appeal defies, in retrospect, some of the early critics' views of Raisin as being simply "a play about Negroes." Although Raisin addresses specific problems of a black family in Southside Chicago, it also mirrors the very real problems of all people. In an interview with social historian Studs Terkel, Hansberry explains, ". . . in order to create the universal, you must pay very close attention to the specific."
Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, the last of four children born to the independent, politically active, Republican, and well-to-do Carl and Nannie Perry Hansberry. Hospitals were required at that time to list the racial identities of newborns; however, upon receiving their daughter's birth certificate, Hansberry's parents crossed out the word "Negro" and wrote "Black," an act of minor significance but certainly a testament to the Afrocentric ideology that the elder Hansberrys bequeathed to their children.
