Analysis Of A Raisin In The Sun By Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry was born May 19th, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. She was the youngest of seven children, and was the granddaughter of a slave. Her mother was a school teacher, and her father was a real estate broker. In 1938, her family moved to an all-white neighborhood and were victims of racist crimes and violence. They refused to move until the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Lee in the Hansberry v. Lee case. With the judge ruling in favor of Lee, who sued so that no African- Americans could live in their neighborhood, the Hansberry’s were forced to move. Hansberry, unlike her parents who went to southern, all black universities, attended the University of Wisconsin. She dropped out two years later after changing her major from fine art to writing and moved to New York where she attended the New School for Social Research. She then worked for the Freedom newspaper as a writer and associate editor from 1950 to 1953. Between the Freedom newspaper and working as a waitress she wrote in her free time. She decided she liked writing

Hansberry has gone through many challenging milestones having to move to a white suburb neighborhood at age of eight. Hansberry and her family had faced with multiple attacks against them. In the source About the Playwright: Lorraine Hansberry wrote “Shortly afterwards, Hansberry herself was nearly killed by a brick hurled through a window by angry whites” Mobs of white people surround her home since her family is African American. In which connects to her play A Raisin in the sun when Johnson said “NERGROS INVADE CLYBROURNE PARK BOMBED”

All of that damage done to young Lorraine Hansberry changed her when she got older. She got married in 1953 with Robert Nemiroff . She went to multiple colleges. In the late 40’s she saw Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock and she loved it. That then drove her to write plays that includes social activism and artistic expressions Tillman. She then

Lorraine Hansberry was the first Black woman to pen a Broadway play. In her writings, she wrote male characters, many of whom were male protagonists. Being the feminist that she was, many people saw Hansberry’s depiction of Black men in one of two ways; either as an unhappy retreat from her feminist concerns or as a negative representation of Black manhood. Throughout her career, in works such as “The Village Voice” and “Les Blancs” Hansberry’s wrote other male characters that showed a progressive, revolutionary movement towards a positive and withstanding view of Black masculinity.

“Money is not the key to happiness,” no big pay amount would make much of a difference. As people in America everybody thinks you cannot afford to avoid the unhappiness of having to  life,  having plenty of cash does not make your any more enjoyable then what it is in the present. Happiness depends on how you feel towards your loved ones which in Lorraine Hansberry's Play, “A Raisin In the Sun” Walter's obsession with money often caused him to act unkindly to his loved ones. In the book Raisin in the Sun a family from the Southside of Chicago they lived in a small apartment trying to find a way out of the community they have lived in. The Younger family was dealing with living in a white dominant society dealing with poverty and prejudice acts. The Youngers’ try to ignore the obstacles and stay on their feet throughout the 1950s.

Hansberry went on to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison but she found college to be uninspiring to her passion in writing. In 1950 she left college and moved to New York City to pursue her writing career. There she married Robert Nemiroff and with his success with his music career Hansberry was able to leave her job as a waitress and cashier to devote herself to writing. In 1959 she wrote “A Raisin in The Sun”, the play was an instant success. Hansberry became the first African-American women to receive the New York Drama Critics Award and to have a play produced on

Zora Neale Hurston is the speaker of this article, who is a colored girl growing up in a small Negro town in Florida named Eatonville. When she moved to Jacksonville, she realized what it was actually like being a colored girl in the outside world. Nevertheless, she was really proud of her ethnicity and disregarded all criticism.

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on March 19, 1930. Hansberry was an African American. She was one of four siblings that include two brothers and one sister. In the 1930’s racism and segregation was prevalent in the time. Her parents were “civil rights activist Carl and Nannie Hansberry” Tillman. She was raised in the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Her family was one of the wealthy African-American families in Chicago. When she was five years old, her parents got her a fur coat. She wore it to school one day and she got beaten for wearing it. Also, when she was eight years old she moved to the white suburbs of Chicago and once her and her family arrived at their new homes they faced harassment and threats by mobs of white people. She nearly died after getting hit in the head with a brick. Her father went to court to fight for the legal right to live in that new neighborhood. The Supreme Court case of Hansberry v. Lee Weston Playhouse Theater Company. The characters in A Raisin in the Sun are black and live in Chicago just like Hansberry. The characters are also going through segregation/racism, similar to Hansberry.

nursing certificate. Not only was she the first African American to receive a nursing certificate,

In A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, there are a number of symbols that represent various concepts that can all be traced back to issues on race. Many symbols in The Raisin in the Sun, for example, capture the restricted opportunity given to the Younger family and African Americans as a whole; these symbols show the true magnitude of the issue of race at the time the drama was written. Nonetheless, among the strongest hidden meanings in A Raisin in the Sun, is not a symbol but a character. Travis Younger is a living, breathing motif that firmly represents the young hope for the African American community.

Lorraine Hansberry, author of To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, shows deep passion about the topic of discrimination and the idea of the American Dream throughout her writing.

To make a connection of Lorraine Hansberry to the social realism movement, a brief biography can help to explain this relation. Particularly, Lorraine was a black American born in the 1930s to the underprivileged portion of the South Side of Chicago. Being of this era, her father was a very successful real estate agent and her mother, a local school teacher. Still regardless of her family wealth, unfortunately, they are forced to reside in the undesirable poor section of the city, as many other black families had. With prospect opportunities, her family then has the desires to move to a white privileged neighborhood. Here, they are met with much rejection almost immediately that lead her father to take legal actions. Due to the color of their skin, like others, she faced the many complexities of racial segregation, discrimination, and violence. There later became a time to address those issues by way of the Civil Rights Movement, looking to end racial segregation and gain equal opportunities for those of African descent. Noted in an American History Journal, the author emphasized that, “[Critics] maintained that the civil rights movement failed to produce significant reforms in either education or housing, despite vigorous campaigns by local and national organizations”( Broussard 1394 ). Even after the Jim Crow laws of the South were extinguished, many African Americans journeyed to

In the book “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry, there were characters whose dreams were stated, some of which were shattered by greed and misfortune and others which would eventually come to be true. The first dream that came about was Walter’s dream of one day owning and maintaining a liquor store. He would do anything to attempt to get his dream to come true, but his mama wanted anything but that to happen. His mama had a dream of her own though, she dreamed of one day owning her own house, where her whole family could stay comfortably. She dreamed this because in the apartment that she resided in was too small, and dumpy, as Ruth called it. Her grandson Travis had to sleep on the couch, and all

She was heavily involved in the Civil Rights movement to make life for African Americans, especially women African Americans, safer and more equal. Therefore, Lorraine Hansberry dedicated her lifetime to these Civil Rights movements

Lorraine Hansberry’s novel, A Raisin in the Sun, revolves around a middle-class African-American family, struggling during World War II. By reading about the Younger’s true to life experiences, one learns many important life lessons. One of the aforementioned would be that a person should always put family’s needs before their own. There are many examples of this throughout the novel. Just a few of these would be the example of Ruth and her unborn baby, Walter regaining the respect of his family, and Mama and her unselfish ways.