CHICAGO — I’ve been reading about Lorraine Hansberry.
After a long time of not reading very much at all about Lorraine Hansberry. There just wasn’t that much out there about her to read. Her work is (still) not in the Library of America, and even her papers were not generally available to scholars until a couple of decades ago. So there were few major biographies or revelations. Until about five years ago, the Chicago author of “A Raisin in the Sun” (and many lesser-known plays and writings) was a literary question mark, a figure of monumental importance — “Raisin in the Sun” is routinely considered a demarcation line in the representation of Black figures in America art — whose life and output appeared to begin and end with a single play.
Then PBS’ American Masters (via Sundance) aired a well-received documentary on Hansberry; the prolific Imani Perry wrote 2018′s “Looking for Lorraine Hansberry,” an entertaining, biographical rumination; last year, Soyica Diggs Colbert took the more scholarly route with “Radical Vision,” a close reading of Hansberry’s writings and stringent politics. Still to come: Margaret B. Wilkerson, the leading Hansberry scholar, and only biographer with complete access to the Hansberry estate’s trove of writings and papers, has been knocking away for decades on the definitive history of the author.
