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Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by a black writer to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She was also the first woman and youngest playwright to win that award. The roots of her philosophical views lie in Chicago, the place of her birth. Her childhood there held curious contradictions. She grew up in an upper middle-class family, but she lived in Chicago, a city of racial barriers and boundaries. Wealth may have freed her mind and spirit, but it could not free her colored body. In the early 1950´s, Hansberry worked as a journalist for Freedom, a black, progressive newspaper in New York City. During this time, undercurrents of social protest were quietly growing, despite the Red Scare, McCarthyism and hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Numerous violations of human rights, the brutality of the South, and labor protests filled the pages of Freedom. With this work Hansberry gained an education in politics, culture and economics. While she treasured this work, she found journalism ultimately too restrictive. For people had to stick with facts, even if they obscured deeper truths. In A Raisin in the Sun, we see her first successful attempt to transform the experience of her early years in Chicago into a drama which captured the deferred dreams of a race of people, while exposing the materialistic dangers of the society which evokes, then frustrates those dreams. A Raisin in the Sun dramatizes the seductiveness of American materialistic values by depicting the aspirations of black family, the Youngers, who live in Southside Chicago of the 1950´s. Hansberry once said that "in order to create the universal you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality ... emerges from truthful identity of what it is." She forced a redefinition of the term ´universality,´ one which would include the dissonant voice of an oppressed American minority. She tried to capture a universal cry of human misery of her own people. A Raisin in the sun is rooted in personal experience, an experience which red on Hansberry racial identity, and though the struggle of the Younger family for a sense of dignity or a space within which self-definition can become possible,was not restricted race, it is clear that for Hansberry the play rests not on the fact of race but on the meaning ascribed to it. The vitality and sharp definition of characters, the with and humor of its sparkling dialogue, and the continued affirmation of the play´s message by black and white audiences alike, have caused audiences to return year after year to relive the now well-known rituals of the Younger family.
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