Looking for Lorraine The radiant and radical life of Lorraine Hansberry

LORRAINE HANSBERRY WAS One of the most brilliant minds to pass through the American theater, a model of that virtually extinct species known as the artist-activist. She died young, of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34, but left behind a body of work containing at least two genuine masterpieces, whose political and emotional reach more than make up for its relative slimness. "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window" (1964), a shattering study of liberal self-delusion and whiteness as an existential crisis, is criminally neglected, but "A Raisin in the Sun" (1959) is perhaps the most widely read, taught and produced play by a black writer in history. Yet its significance is frequently reduced to its having been the first play by a black woman to be staged on Broadway - as if being on Broadway ever had anything to do with literary merit. In fact, "A Raisin in the Sun" was a game-changer, still virtually unmatched in the power and polish of its composition as a study of African-American lives; in its sly conceptual wrestling with the American theater canon's white masculinist character (see Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets); and in its appropriation of social-realist trappings to break new ground for emotional identification with black bodies. You could probably divide American drama into before "Raisin" and after. The plays of August Wilson would be unthinkable without the groundwork laid by Hansberry's aesthetic and emotional experiments, and her effect is apparent in the ascension of Lynn Nottage, recently the winner of a historic second Pulitzer Prize for her play "Sweat," to the front ranks of American dramatists working today. Without Hansberry, it's easy to see that there might be, in addition to no Nottage, no George C. Wolfe, no Suzan-Lori Parks, no Lydia Diamond, no Tarell Alvin McCraney. I would dare to suggest that there might even be no Spike Lee, no Shonda Rhimes and no Donald Glover. Born in 1930 into a middle-class black family in Depression-era Chicago, Hansberry seemed almost predestined to rock the boat of American culture. Her mother was a ward leader for the Republican Party. Her father, a local real-estate developer, successfully sued his way into a white neighborhood, a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. (This ordeal made an impression on the adolescent Hansberry and, in part, inspired "A Raisin in the Sun.") At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Lorraine studied painting and sculpture and acted in plays, she single-handedly integrated a women's dorm. Early in her writing life, she was mentored by both W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. And yet next to nothing is broadly known about her life, beyond the facts that she was black and a woman and, maybe, that she was a communist and queer. So Imani Perry, a prolific African-American studies scholar at Princeton, is spot on when she writes in her new book, "Looking for Lorraine," that Hansberry "has had far too little written about her. ... Her image in the public arena has a persistent flatness." Yet it is difficult to assess a book that admits within its first two paragraphs that it has no idea what it is. Perry concedes that what she has written is "less a biography than a genre yet to be named." She hazards instead the non-idea of a "third person memoir," which is, unhelpfully, the very definition of a biography. In fact, "Looking for Lorraine" is something between a fan's notes and an academic monograph, less an unpacking of the archive to reveal the life than an exercise in putting the archive in historical context. Its strongest chapters - on "A Raisin in the Sun" and Lorraine's coming into her own as a public intellectual - are masterly syntheses of research and analysis. It's a joy for devotees to encounter some record of Hansberry's influences, including the Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey and the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Hansberry's influence on her contemporaries was equally striking. Nina Simone, whom she befriended during her early stardom, credited Hansberry for her political education: "We never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution - real girls' talk." James Baldwin was a friend and intellectual sparring partner, whose work, read alongside hers, can sometimes seem, as Perry puts it, like a "call-and-response." And then there is Hansberry's dressing-down of Robert F. Kennedy, who as attorney general in 1963 invited her to a private gathering of "influential" blacks to discuss racial unrest in Birmingham. As Baldwin later recalled it, Hansberry, with growing irritation, scolded Kennedy for failing to see racial injustice as a moral rather than social problem, and the evening ended with her walking out. Within a month, however, President John F. Kennedy delivered the speech that led to passage of the Civil Rights Act, invoking a moral imperative for civil rights as well as a legal one. PERRY MAKES A WELCOME CASE for a fresh assessment of Hansberry's nondramatic works: her short stories, many published pseudonymously in lesbian magazines, and her many letters and op-eds on politics and literature for The Village Voice and The New York Times. (Where is her Library of America edition?) Yet much of the material Perry discusses is drawn from Hansberry's published writings, which might be a negligible point if the body of work she left behind were not easily consumable over a matter of days. This also might explain why Perry seems on her least sure footing when addressing Hansberry's childhood. Hansberry didn't find her calling as a writer until she was in her 20 s, and then seemingly only by accident, having dropped out of Wisconsin and moved to New York, where she took a job as a journalist for a leftist Negro weekly. Sadly, the motives for her turn away from the visual to the literary arts are virtually glossed over here. There are hints that early in her career the theater played a significant role in a relationship with a female friend - possibly a lover - but these, like so many potential threads linking Hansberry's queerness with her art, are left unexplored. Similarly, the dynamics of her longest romantic relationship, with Dorothy Secules, an executive at a candy company who was a tenant in the brownstone Hansberry owned in Greenwich Village, are dispensed with in a few paragraphs. (Hansberry was married for 11 years to the songwriter and political activist Robert Nemiroff.) At one point, Perry says she "dare not" speculate about the suggestion of same-sex desire in a poem Hansberry wrote when she was 19, but she has no problem speculating about Hansberry's grief over the loss of her father or, later, her experience of terminal illness. After proposing connections between a piece of Hansberry's queer fiction and her life, Perry concedes, "But I cannot say this story is autobiographical, in whole or part." So why does she bring the issue up? I frequently found myself wishing that she'd had more confidence, either to break through her skittishness surrounding Hansberry's queerness or simply to devote the book to her adulation for Hansberry's work. Perry may not have written an exceptionally satisfying book, but she has undoubtedly written a necessary one. I have often bemoaned the suspicious absence of so many transformative minority lives from the annals of American theater history, among them Lloyd Richards, who went on from directing "A Raisin in the Sun" on Broadway to virtually revolutionizing the landscape of American playwriting during the remainder of the 20th century; Ellen Stewart, the visionary founder of LaMaMa, a key player in the professionalization of the American avant-garde and the redevelopment of the East Village; as well as the embarrassingly underappreciated playwright and actress Alice Childress. Perry alludes to a more comprehensive Hansberry biography apparently in the works by Margaret Wilkerson, who is widely recognized as the leading Hansberry scholar. This is good news to those of us to whom a full reckoning of Hansberry's life and power has seemed like a dream too long deferred. BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS, an award-winning playwright, is the author of "Gloria" and "Everybody," both recent finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

*Starred Review* She sparked and sparkled, writes Perry of Lorraine Hansberry, who was all of 29 when her best-known work, the Chicago-set play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened on Broadway in 1959. Perry observes, audiences had never before seen the work of a Black playwright and director, featuring a Black cast with no singing, dancing, or slapstick and a clear social message. In spite of Hansberry's subsequent celebrity, knowledge and understanding of her life and her varied and vital body of work have been superficial at best. Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, seeks to deepen our appreciation in this richly dimensional portrait of a brightly blazing artist, thinker, and activist. Inspired, in part, by Alice Walker's 1975 essay reclaiming the until-then forgotten anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, Perry does not dwell on the minutiae of traditional biographical coverage of what, when, and where, focusing, instead, on who and why, on inner drama rather than exterior events. Mining writings private and published; collecting memories; tracking the reverberations of Hansberry's personality, words, and actions; and, at times, entering the narrative, Perry illuminates with arresting impact Hansberry's thoughts, feelings, and revolutionary social consciousness. Beginning with Hansberry's discomfort with her prominent Chicago family's conspicuous privileges and high expectations, Perry sets Hansberry's attunement to racial and economic injustice within the larger story of the city's systemic racism. She then charts Hansberry's navigation of a very different environment at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she sensed that art might enable her to do something meaningful in the world. Her artistic self emerged in concert with her commitment to progressive activism, leading her to Greenwich Village in 1950. There Hansberry worked for Freedom, a newspaper founded by Paul Robeson; studied with W. E. B. Du Bois; embraced communism; came under FBI surveillance; concealed her lesbianism; and married a Jewish leftist, Robert Nemiroff, who supported her writing life and later ensured that her work was preserved. Perry delves into Hansberry's journals, letters, poems, essays, plays, and fiction, including gay stories published under the name Emily Jones. She closely examines Hansberry's crucial friendships with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. Perry notes that a combination of play and seriousness was at the core of her personality, while Hansberry was burdened with depression and driven by a relentless intellectualism. A born political organizer with a richly informed global vision, she was daringly forthright in articulating her radicalism as she fought for genuine equality for black people everywhere. The human condition was Lorraine's obsession and commitment, Perry writes, and how much more she would have accomplished had cancer not cruelly shortened her life. A captivating, independent, many-faceted, far-ahead-of-her-time writer and freedom fighter, Hansberry died at age 34 in 1965. Perry's ardent, expert, and redefining work of biographical discovery brings light, warmth, scope, and enlightening complexity to the spine-straightening story of a brilliant, courageous, seminal, and essential American writer.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Perry (May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem) explores the art and life of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the Sun, about the struggles of an African-American family in mid-century inner-city Chicago, and died at the age of 34 in 1965. "She was one of those great artists whose life rode the wave of some of the most pivotal and complex moments in American history," Perry writes. "World War II, McCarthyism, civil rights. Lorraine was right in the thick of it, trying to make sense of it all." Perry also details Hansberry's activities as a socialist; writes with curiosity and empathy about her complex personal life, including her marriage to a white man, Robert Nemiroff, and her romances with women; and examines the influences upon her of her college-educated parents and mentors, friends such as James Baldwin and Nina Simone, and fellow writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Insightful literary analyses of Hansberry's writings fit alongside annotations of excerpts from her diaries and admiring and affectionate declarations about her. This book, "less a biography than a genre yet to be named-maybe third-person memoir?", is an unusual and exceptional encomium to a brilliant writer and thinker. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.