A “loving, lavishly detailed” (New York Times) and captivating
portrait of Lorraine Hansberry’s life, art, and political
activism—one of O Magazine's best books of April 2021
"A devoted
and deeply felt account of the development of an artist’s
mind."—Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review (2021 Summer
Reading issue)
In this acclaimed
biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Soyica Diggs Colbert narrates a life
at the intersection of art and politics, arguing that for Hansberry
the theater operated as a rehearsal room for her political and
intellectual work. Celebrated for her play A Raisin in the Sun,
Hansberry was also the author of innovative journalism and of plays
touching on slavery, interracial communities, and Black freedom
movements. Hansberry was deeply involved in the Black freedom
struggle during the Cold War and in the early civil rights movement,
and here Colbert shows us an artist’s life with the background of
the Greenwich Village art scene in the 1960s, the homophile movement,
Black diasporic freedom movements, and third-wave feminism.
Drawing from
Hansberry’s papers, speeches, and interviews, this book provides a
new point of entry in the history of Black radicalism, and a new
perspective on Black women in mid‑twentieth‑century
political movements.