Commitment amid Complexity: Lorraine Hansberry's Life in Action

It may seem odd to precede an article with a chronology, but it is odder still that to date no chronology has been published on Lorraine Hansberry. This failure in scholarship is symptomatic of the continuing critical and scholarly neglect of important black artists and especially of Hansberry. During the fifteen years since her death, the only attempt at a formally structured, "lengthy" biography was Catherine Scheader's They Found a Way: Lorraine Hansberry, a recently published seventy-eight page book which (though informative and accurate) was intended for children. Moreover, Robert Nemiroff's informal biography, To Be Young, Gifted and Black (a juxtaposition of Hansberry's autobiographical writings with portions of her essays, speeches, poetry and dramatic scenes), was ignored by critics, receiving no review in the Nezv York Times or any of the major news magazines and scholarly journals. Similarly, few books on American or twentieth-century drama mention Hansberry, and these cite only her pioneering role in black drama with A Raisin in the Sun. The time is long past due to give her the treatment accorded to other major twentiethcentury dramatists. An accurate Hansberry chronology is needed, in part, to correct the enormous amount of misinformation about her. She did not, for example, meet her husband, Robert Nemiroff, while working as a waitress in a restaurant owned by his family, as implied in Current Biography 1959; neither did she own slum property, as Harold Cruse maliciously asserted in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In addition, even a rudimentary chronology should help to clear away the general ignorance of her many radical activities which has permitted critics and students-on too many occasions-to succumb to the myth that Hansberry was an "establishment artist," less interested in changing the system than in getting a home in suburbia, a television, and two cars. An examination of her funeral, by itself, would preclude a facile acceptance of this myth since representatives MELUS, Volume 7, No. 3, Fall 1980