Imani Perry ’s Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Beacon Press, Sept.) is expected to change all that. Her premature death has frozen her image in time and obscured the full-flower and dynamic range of her artistic, social, political and personal complexity. Six years later on Januat the age of 34, Hansberry, intelligent, beautiful, and charismatic, died from pancreatic cancer leaving behind a trove of plays, unpublished and unfinished TV screenplays, and various writings. Arguably one of the most famous works of art produced during the Civil Rights Era, the play made its author a star. First produced on Broadway in 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a groundbreaking play about an African American family in inner city Chicago, won the New York Drama Critics Circle award and in 1961 was made into an iconic film starring Sidney Poitier, Diana Sands and Ruby Dee.
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