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.