Hello my lovely readers! This is yet another biography NOT on part of my 12 Lives Challenge. Sigh. At this rate, I might as well redo my list for the challenge because thus far, I've only read one off my planned list. Yikes! Let's get into this biography!
SYNOPSIS
Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the 100 most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Yet so much of her life has escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband--her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues she struggled about class, sexuality, and race with are relevant and urgent today.
This dramatic telling of a passionate life-- a very American life through self-reinvention-- uses interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries, and to raise new questions about a life not fully described until this, the authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry.
Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the 100 most significant works of the twentieth century. Hansberry was the first black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award. Yet so much of her life has escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband--her best friend, critic, and promoter. Many of the identity issues she struggled about class, sexuality, and race with are relevant and urgent today.
This dramatic telling of a passionate life-- a very American life through self-reinvention-- uses interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries, and to raise new questions about a life not fully described until this, the authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry.
MY THOUGHTS
This was a solid biography. I didn't know much about Lorraine Hansberry outside of A Raisin in the Sun (which was brilliant!) and this biography gave a comprehensive view into who she was. It seems like Hansberry and all her contemporaries were Communists, which I found interesting, but I know that was a big no-no back then.
This was a solid biography. I didn't know much about Lorraine Hansberry outside of A Raisin in the Sun (which was brilliant!) and this biography gave a comprehensive view into who she was. It seems like Hansberry and all her contemporaries were Communists, which I found interesting, but I know that was a big no-no back then.
Shields did a good job in writing about Hansberry's life, but he's a defensive jerk. His responses to any critical review on this biography are extremely rude.
" Now that woke-ism has been discredited, and its underlying racism revealed, would you write the same review now. And sorry, I didn't include more details about her ugly, debilitating death. Do you get off on that kind of thing? "
Also, somehow Imani Perry (author of Looking for Lorraine--a part memoir/bio on Hansberry, that came out in 2018) caught a stray when he was responding to a reviewer.
" Without much illumination? You can say that after I detailed block busting by slumlords like Carl Hansberry; the dynamics of racist Chicago; how Lorraine struggled with her bisexuality; what a nightmare writing the play was. Have you tried a YA adult version, or Imani Perry's book for an 8th-grade portrait of a strange and difficult woman?
Bro, it is never that serious. This really turned me off from him an almost stopped me from finishing the book. I have Mockingbird on my shelf, which is another biography by him, but I'm unsure if I'll read it due to his shenanigans. I definitely plan on reading Perry's biography though!
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