Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun.” Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, was a groundbreaking play in so many ways. Hansberry was the first African American woman to write a Broadway play, and the New York Drama Critics' Circle named it the best play of 1959. The play tells the story of an ordinary African American family, warts and all, and addresses an all-too-common challenge faced by black families in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s – housing discrimination. In the play, the Younger family lives in a cold water flat on the south side of Chicago. Lena Younger – the widowed matriarch of the family, known as Mama – has had a lifelong dream of buying a home of her own. When her husband dies, she decides to use part of the life insurance money as a down payment on a house in Clybourne Park, an all-white neighborhood. Though there are other plot lines involving her daughter, Beneatha, her son, Walter, and her daughter-in-law, Ruth, the major focus of the play is Mama