Lorraine Hansberry

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry ushered in a new era of U.S. theater history. She brought to the stage the realistic portrayal of urban, working-class African American life. Writer James Baldwin offered insights into the impact of her work through his description of the staging of her landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun: "I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater," he related in a 1969 introduction to Hansberry's adapted autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black. "And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage."

But Hansberry did more than just expand...