To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in her Own Words

Author: Lorraine Hansberry
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1996
Pages: 304
ISBN: 978-0679764151

In her first play, the now-classic A Raising In the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry introduced the lives of ordinary African Americans into our national theatrical reperatory. In this book-- which inspired a play that has been performed almost as often as Raising itself-- Hansberry transformed her own life sotry into a work that has moved and inspried a generation of readers.

Assembled from Hansberry’s plays, essays, letters, drawings, and photographs, To Be Young, Gifted and Black records a life of passionate engagement and spectacular accomplishment. It follows the author from her childhood in Chicago (where her family encountered vicious resistance when it moved into a white neighborhood), through her arrival in New York, where the triumph of Raisin made her famous virtually overnight, to her death at the tragically early age of thirty-four. Above all, Hansberry’s autobiography rings with the voice of its creator: a black woman who could be angry, loving, bitter, touchingly funny, and defiantly proud.