This edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff.

Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of Black America--and changed American theater forever. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem Harlem, which warns that a dream deferred might dry up/like a raisin in the sun.

The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun, said The New York Times. It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black is a special kind of autobiography, in a very special voice. Both the story and the voice belong to a young woman from Chicago who moved to New York, won fame with her first play, A Raisin in the Sun--and went on to new heights of artistry before her tragically early death.

In turns angry, loving, bitter, laughing, and defiantly proud, the story, voice, and message are all Lorraine Hansberry's own, coming together in one of the major works of the Black experience in mid-twentieth-century America.

A milestone.--TIME

Wonderfully moving and entertaining.--Clive Barnes, THE NEW YORK TIMES

I advise anybody who is interested in the human condition, black or white, to read it.--NEWSDAY

Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of black America--and changed American theater forever. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem Harlem, which warns that a dream deferred might dry up/like a raisin in the sun.

The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun, said The New York Times. It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic. This Modern Library edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff.

The 1961 film version of A Raisin in the Sun, with a screenplay by the author, Lorraine Hansberry, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival even though one-third of the actual screenplay Hansberry had written had been cut out. The film did essentially bring Hansberry's extraordinary play to the screen, but it failed to fulfill her cinematic vision.

Now, with this landmark edition of Lorraine Hansberry's original script for the movie of A Raisin in the Sun that audiences never viewed, readers have at hand an epic, eloquent work capturing not only the life and dreams of a Black family, but the Chicago--and the society--that surround and shape them.

Important changes in dialogue and exterior shots, a stunning shift of focus to her male protagonist, and a dramatic rewriting of the final scene show us an artist who understood and used the cinematic medium to transform a stage play into a different art form--a profound and powerful film.

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.

The 1961 film version of A Raisin in the Sun, with a screenplay by the author, Lorraine Hansberry, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival even though one-third of the actual screenplay Hansberry had written had been cut out. The film did essentially bring Hansberry's extraordinary play to the screen, but it failed to fulfill her cinematic vision.

Now, with this landmark edition of Lorraine Hansberry's original script for the movie of A Raisin in the Sun that audiences never viewed, readers have at hand an epic, eloquent work capturing not only the life and dreams of a Black family, but the Chicago--and the society--that surround and shape them.

Important changes in dialogue and exterior shots, a stunning shift of focus to her male protagonist, and a dramatic rewriting of the final scene show us an artist who understood and used the cinematic medium to transform a stage play into a different art form--a profound and powerful film.

This is the probing hilarious and provocative story of Sidney a disenchanted Greenwich Village intellectual his wife Iris an aspiring actress and their colorful circle of friends and relations. Set against the shenanigans of a stormy political campaign the play follows its characters in their unorthodox quests for meaningful lives in an age of corruption alienation and cynicism. With compassion humor and poignancy the author examines questions concerning the fragility of love morality and ethics interracial relationships drugs rebellion conformity and especially withdrawal from or commitment to the world.

Rich and warm and funny and varied ... beautifully written. --Los Angeles Times, on The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

One of a handful of great American plays--it belongs in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Glass Menagerie. --Washington Post, on A Raisin in the Sun

By the time of her death, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two milestones of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of black family life in the inner city. Barely five years later, with The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, Hansberry gave us an unforgettable portrait of a man struggling with his individual fate in an age of racial and social injustice.

Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of Black people's lives been seen on the stage, observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem Harlem, which warns that a dream deferred might dry up/like a raisin in the sun.

From John Blaine's Foreword to The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window It is drama of such clarity that one may return to it again and again, and, I expect, emerge as deeply moved; and each time the more illumined.... Miss Hansberry, I am convinced, doesn't know how to create a character who isn't gloriously diverse, illuminatingly contradictory, heart-breakingly alive.... [A] personal odyssey of discovery, a confrontation with others in the process of which [Brustein] discovers himself.

A long-running success of the 1968/69 Off-Broadway season. Fast paced powerful touching and hilarious this kaleidoscope of constantly shifting scenes mood and images recreates the world of a great American woman and artist Lorraine Hansberry. Uniquely and boldly the play dramatically weaves through her life experiences and the times that shaped her. The actors slip ingeniously into and out of a variety of challenging roles spanning her life and experiences to the ultimate confrontation when cancer strikes her. Includes brilliantly high lighted scenes from her plays as well as letters diaries poems and personal reminiscences. A major statement of the American Black experience.

ÿ An extraordinary achievement!...A whirl of probing celebrating hoping laughing despairing and moving on...so brilliantly and tenderly alive. - The New York Times

A milestone. - Time