Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind ‘A Raisin in the Sun’

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. (Jan.)