Lorraine Hansberry, at twenty-nine, became the youngest
American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to win
the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best Play of the
Year. Her A Raisin in the Sun has since been published
and produced in some 30 countries, while her film adaptation was
nominated by the New York critics for the Best Screenplay and
received a Cannes Film Festival Award. At thirty-four, during the
run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,
Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer. In the years since her death,
her stature has continued to grow. To Be Young, Gifted and
Black, a dramatic portrait of the playwright in her own words, was
the longest-running Off-Broadway drama of 1969, and has been
recorded, filmed, and published in expanded book form, and has
toured an unprecedented forty states and two hundred colleges. In
1986, following the stage production of the 25th anniversary
of A Raisin in the Sun by the Roundabout Theatre in New
York City, the play was widely acclaimed as in the foremost ranks
of American classics. In 1990, the PBS American
Playhouse TV adaptation of the 25th-anniversary version had
one of the highest viewing audiences in PBS history. Les
Blancs, her last play—posthumously performed on Broadway and
recently in prominent regional theaters—has been hailed by a number
of critics as her best.
James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist,
playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell
It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and
his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The
Fire Next Time were bestsellers that made him an influential
figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of
his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and
homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year
after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.
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