American playwright Lorraine Hansberry was born at Chicago, ILon 19 May 1930. For her now classic play A Raisin in the Sun, she became the youngest American and first Black to win the Best Play Award from the New York Critics Circle.
The play, titled after the Langston Hughes poem,deals with issues such as racism, cultural pride and self-respect and was the first stage production written by a Black woman to appear on Broadway (1959). To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, a book of excerpts from her journals, letters, speeches and plays, was published posthumously in 1969.
Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer 12 January 1965, at New York, NY.