Assembled from plays, essays, letters, drawings, and photographs, this
memoir records the passionate engagement and spectacular accomplishment
of the playwright of A Raisin in the Sun.
It follows Lorraine Hansberry 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 A
Raisin in the Sun 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.