“Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind ‘A Raisin in the Sun’”
Author: Charles J. Shields
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.
Pages: 384
Price: $29.99 (Hardcover)
Playwright’s Life Was Brief, Diverse, and Controversial
Charles Shields is best known to Alabamians for his biography of Nelle Harper Lee, having published “Mockingbird,” the first “life” of the Monroeville native, in 2006 and then a revised biography just after her death in 2016.
Shields had previously written short biographies for young readers, but the Lee books established him as a major biographer and he has since written the lives of Kurt Vonnegut and John Williams.
Now he has turned to the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose life has been done previously, just recently by Imani Perry.
Biographers are drawn to Hansberry because it is a dramatic, even sensational life story, though cut short.
Hansberry’s father was a part of the great migration from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, arriving in 1916.
He worked hard and in his own way became a strong example of the American Dream, one particular variety.
For a while he was a rent collector, and he saw first-hand great opportunities in real estate in Chicago. He would buy an apartment building and then, using simple plywood partitions, subdivide the apartments into what were known as “kitchenettes.” These kitchenettes were famous in Chicago, and not in a good way.
Basically a kitchenette was a one-room apartment, ten feet by ten feet, with stove, fridge and sink, the bathrooms in the hallway. There was no heat.
African-Americans pouring in from the South were limited, one might even say corralled, to sections of the South Side. Prejudice and housing covenants kept them from other parts of the city and the suburbs to the west. They needed a place to live and paid top dollar for these terrible and tiny apartments.
Carl Hansberry grew rich and bought a house in “white” Woodlawn, and there encountered hostility and violence.
In time, this experience, heavily reimagined, would be the basis for “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Lorraine, a vivacious girl, began writing early, as a child really. She was well educated, privileged, and in 1948 went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, one of few black students.
While there she read widely, especially the protest literature of DuBois and Wright, and fell permanently under the spell of the work of Irish playwright Sean O’ Casey, especially “Juno and the Paycock.” Shields outlines the parallels between the family dynamics in “Raisin” and in “Juno.”
Hansberry also became active with the American left, progressive student organizations, Henry Wallace supporters, the labor Youth League in Madison.
Leaving Madison, she landed in New York City and went to work for Paul Robeson’s leftist journal “Freedom.”
Robeson, valedictorian at Rutgers, Columbia law school graduate, athlete, actor in O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones” and “Othello,” world famous singer, was, Shields writes, “one of the most famous people alive in 1950.”
Hansberry never officially joined the Communist Party USA, but the FBI was following Hansberry all her life. She was never arrested or subpoenaed but her file finally ran to 1,000 pages.
Now there was a big waste of national resources.
Hansberry wrote leftist articles and went to work on her own play.
Her personal life was unusual and diverse. Hansberry married a white man, Robert Nemiroff. They stayed married nearly to her death at 35 of pancreatic cancer.
She loved that he was less of a misogynist than most. He loved her mind and her self, just as she was. Nemiroff would become a financially successful songwriter. Eddie Fisher had a hit with his version of "Cindy Oh Cindy."
She grew restless in her marriage, however, and was influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s arguments concerning lesbianism in “The Second Sex,” that “Homosexuality is no more a deliberate perversion than a fatal curse. It is an attitude that is chosen in situation.”
Honest feeling, authenticity, was the point, not doctrinaire thinking. For the rest of her life, she would have affairs with women as well as men. Nemiroff understood and accepted. They were still partners.
This element of French existentialism Hansberry embraced.
Shields is quite eloquent in discussing the varieties of expression Hansberry rejected.
Existential despair, dreary nihilism were out. As a committed Marxist, she rejected the idea of an irrational, meaningless universe.
She had no use for the Beat Generation and Ginsburg. She felt they appropriated Black pain and never made clear what they were revolting against.
Absurdist drama, like existentialism was out.
No “Waiting for Godot” or Edward Albee for her.
In painting, abstract expressionist art was rejected.
Art, she felt, like a good ’30s socialist, MUST be in the service of a social cause.
When she finished “Raisin,” it was produced on Broadway, starring Sidney Poitier, to enormous acclaim. She was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway. Hansberry became wealthy from the film rights. She received about $1.5 million in today’s money and her share of box office receipts was about $35,000 per week.
The American Marxist had become a millionaire.
There are also wonderful paradoxes in “Raisin” itself, in my opinion.
The setting of the play could have been one of her father’s apartments, an enterprise from which she had received a monthly check all her life.
Critics saw the play as social protest, to be sure. The Younger family, with a life insurance payout from the father, wants to escape their oppressive kitchenette apartment, move to the suburbs, and they are met with racist resistance from their future white neighbors.
Although a lifetime advocate for art promoting a cause, Hansberry kept the protest/propaganda element down in “Raisin.” The characters are live human beings, not representative types, and the critics and audiences loved it.
Hansberry would live only five years more. "Raisin in the Sun,” however, is "the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage and is listed by the National Theatre in Washington, D. C., as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century."
Hansberry received invitations to read and speak all over the country and, Shields ventures, on the basis of that one powerful piece, that she was “arguably the first black woman intellectual to become a national celebrity.”
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