Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun

By Charles J. Shields  

Henry Holt and Co.   384 pp.

By Jim Swearingen

The jackals are on the prowl again, those officious guardians of America’s moral virtue, censoring and banning works of literature that they have neither learned, nor understood. The latest assaults come from right and left, each side endeavoring to manipulate art to their specific political purposes. That essential debate over the purpose of art, whether to instruct or entertain the audience, has raged since man began dissecting human experience into tidy, oversimplified categories.

The dispute holds added importance in Black art where the appropriation of particular archetypes can either reinforce negative stereotypes, or counter them with defiantly positive depictions of the race. Progress toward social equity demands, some believe, a renewed zeal in censoring artistic depictions that are too folksy, or too common, or too vulgar.

Charles J. Shields’ new biography of playwright Lorraine Hansberry recounts an artistic aesthetic that rejected sanitized depictions or caricatures designed to satisfy a political agenda. The author of that seminal work of American Theatre, A Raisin in the Sun, argued that an artist’s job is not to make day-to-day life more palatable, but to mold an authentic depiction of human experience and in so doing, provide the audience with an edifying resolution. Hansberry had no patience with trendy propaganda or self-indulgent nihilism.

Shields, a frequent biographer of American writers, follows Hansberry’s life from the southside of Chicago to Greenwich Village, from her platonic marriage to a white male ingenu to her various romantic, lesbian affairs, and from her cobbled together life as Communist weekly staff writer to heralded Broadway playwright.

Hansberry was born the youngest daughter of an industrious Chicago slumlord, who built his fortune with overcrowded subdivisions on the South Side —a reminder that the American success story, whether White or Black, is often achieved at the expense of those less fortunate. Hansberry’s father made it big in residential real estate, chopping up old buildings into rented kitchenettes for the throngs of Black Americans arriving in Chicago during the Great Migration. These rat-trap fire hazards went for top dollar in a market that could not satisfy the demand for cheap housing.

It is part of the Hansberry irony that a Black entrepreneur, who took his own neighborhood integration case all the way to the Supreme Court, would pioneer black expansion into white neighborhoods to escape the very slums he had helped create. While the family wealth insulated Lorraine’s upbringing from hard-scrabble working class struggles, it made her impatient to find the “real” Black experience, the unadulterated grist for her literary and political works.

Having hop-scotched from one post-secondary institution to another, never finishing her undergraduate degree, she landed in Harlem where she wrote for Paul Robeson’s Communist weekly, Freedom. Planning to ween herself off of her family money, she did stints as an actress, journalist, waitress, and globe-trotting social activist, before making her literary and financial fortune with A Raisin in the Sun.

The basis of Hansberry’s avowed socialism came from a desire to eradicate racial discrimination and inequality rather than any impulse to redistribute wealth or eradicate capitalism. Indeed, capitalism had been very good to Lorraine and her family, and continued to be so. Despite her embrace of a Bohemian New York artistic crowd and far-left political causes, she never applied a woke socio-political consciousness to the hand that fed her.

And like so many artists, she found a cooperative laboratory that the theater provides to displaced intellectuals and outcast artists—a place to strive and belong.

Shields describes the evolution of A Raisin in the Sun as a collaboration involving director Lloyd Richards and lead actor Sidney Poitier But, her subsequent scripts never again enjoyed such talented participation, despite a stellar circle of associates that included W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin. Her own husband’s meddlesome editing turned her last play into preachy chaos.

Hansberry died too young to match the artistic and commercial success of A Raisin in the Sun, succumbing to pancreatic cancer at 34. Shields hints that had she lived she still might have only been a one-hit wonder of a playwright. But, most of us would take that one hit.