To Be Young, Gifted and Black

About To Be Young, Gifted and Black

Assembled from plays, essays, letters, drawings, and photographs, this memoir records the passionate engagement and spectacular accomplishment of the playwright of A Raisin in the Sun.

It follows Lorraine Hansberry from her childhood in Chicago (where her family encountered vicious resistance when it moved into a white neighborhood), through her arrival in New York, where the triumph of A Raisin in the Sun made her famous virtually overnight, to her death at the tragically early age of thirty-four. Above all, Hansberry’s autobiography rings with the voice of its creator: a black woman who could be angry, loving, bitter, touchingly funny, and defiantly proud.