A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry(1959)
Extract
What happens to a dream deferred?
A family of five shares a cramped apartment on Chicago's South Side, and a ten-thousand-dollar insurance check is about to arrive. Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play made history as the first work by a Black woman produced on Broadway, but its power lies not in the milestone but in the intimacy: Walter Lee Younger's desperate hunger for dignity, Lena Younger's faith rooted deep as a churchyard oak, Beneatha's restless reach toward Africa and medicine and selfhood. Every character wants something the world has conspired to withhold. The play asks what happens to a dream deferred, borrowing Langston Hughes's question and answering it not with abstraction but with the specific weight of a family deciding, together, not to be broken.
If you loved this
Miller stages the same American dream deferred, but the Lomans never face what the Youngers face at the door.
Wright shows the same Chicago from the inside of what Hansberry's family is trying to walk into.
Hurston writes the same Black aspiration, but Janie finds what she's looking for where the Youngers are still fighting for the right to look.