Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born May 19, 1930, in Chicago. Her parents were prominent in black cultural and political circles, which exposed her to arts and culture from an early age. She attended the University of Wisconsin but moved to New York City in 1950.
Hansberry was a reporter and associate editor for Freedom, a progressive black newspaper, from 1950 to 1953, when she quit to pursue a playwriting career. She shortly married Robert Nemiroff, a writer and graduate student at New York University. For the next three years, she worked odd jobs, studied African history with W.E.B. Du Bois and wrote. In 1957, she completed “A Raisin in the Sun,” and it opened on Broadway in 1959.
The play was the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, and it earned her the New York Drama Critics Circle award for Best Play. She was the youngest person and the first black person to win the honor. The play had an all-black cast, except for one person, a black director and many black investors, which opened many possibilities for black people on Broadway.
Hansberry wrote the screenplay for a movie version of her play, which won her a Screenwriters Guild Award and a special award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961. She died Jan. 12, 1965.

— Michael J. Kleckner