Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, and died of cancer at the age of thirty-four. A Raisin in the Sun, her first play, was also the first Broadway production written by an African-American woman and the first by an African American to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (1959). It was subsequently made into a film (1961) for which this screenplay was written by Hansberry but only partially used by David Susskind, the film’s director and producer, a musical (1973), and a PBS television production for American Playhouse (1989). Although deeply committed to the African-American human rights struggle, Hansberry was not a militant writer. Her only other completed play is The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964). Another drama, Les Blancs (1970) was adapted after her death by her husband and Broadway producer Robert Nemiroff. He also compiled her writings in To be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969), also presented as an off-Broadway drama in 1969.
http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/pdf/teachersguides/raisinsun.pdf
http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/pdf/teachersguides/raisinsun.pdf