a raisin in the sun · hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play, the first by a Black woman produced on Broadway, follows the Younger family in a Chicago tenement as an insurance payout forces them to decide what a better life means. Its themes are deferred dreams, dignity, assimilation and the pressure of racism on a family's choices, framed by the Langston Hughes poem that gives it its title.

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (Vintage Books, 1988). Read in full, Junior Fall at Torrey Honors.