Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, the youngest of four children. Her family lived, at the time, on the Southside, in a neighborhood that was entirely black. During this era, segregation--the enforced separation of whites and blacks was still legal, and widespread throughout the south. Northern states, including Hansberry's own Illinois, had no official policy of segregation, but were generally self-segregated along racial and economic lines. Chicago was a striking example, carved as it was into strictly divided black and white neighborhoods. As a child, Hansberry's family became one of the first to move into a white neighborhood. When their neighbors rebelled, both with threats of violence and legal action, the Hansberrys defended themselves; Hansberry's father successfully brought his case all the way to the Supreme Court. Lorraine Hansberry wrote that she always felt the inclination to record her experiences. Her writing--including A Raisin in the Sun--is recognizably autobiographical.

             Hansberry was one of the first playwrights to create realistic portraits of African-American life. When A Raisin in the Sun opened in March of 1959, it was met with great praise, from white and black audience members alike. Hansberry was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year--she was the youngest playwright, the fifth woman, and the only black writer to have won the award by then. Her promising career was cut short, though, when she died from cancer at the age of thirty-four.

             Raisin in the Sun was a watershed because it touched on so many issues important during the 1950s in America. The fifties are widely mocked in modern times as an age of placidity and conformism, well symbolized by the growth of the suburbs and commercial culture that began in the decade. Such a view is superficial at best. Beneath the economic prosperity that characterized post- WWII baby-boom America roiled growing domestic and racial tension.