Years before anyone used the term “intersectionality,” Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) saw, wrote and spoke about the ways class, race and gender discrimination were intertwined in the United States. Unsurprisingly, there’s been a resurgence of interest in her in recent years, with increasing attention paid to Hansberry’s journalism and political activism, in addition to her best-known achievement, the play “A Raisin in the Sun.” Charles J. Shields’s Hansberry biography is the third in little more than three years: Imani Perry blended biography with a personal tribute in “Looking for Lorraine,” and Soyica Diggs Colbert took a more scholarly approach in “Radical Vision,” making detailed analyses of Hansberry’s writings. Shields, also the author of biographies of Harper Lee and Kurt Vonnegut, offers general readers a well-researched account of Hansberry’s life and conscientious summaries of her literary and political work.
Making good use of private papers as well as published materials, Shields paints an evocative portrait of Hansberry’s childhood in Chicago. She grew up in affluence, “smart but spoiled” in the opinion of her older sister’s best friend, “fond of getting attention.” She may have been reacting to her mother’s rigid notions of gentility and propriety. Nannie Hansberry sent her 5-year-old daughter to her first day at a nearly all-White elementary school dressed in ermine, to show that “we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone.” (Lorraine got pushed in the mud by her tough, streetwise classmates.)
In her youth, Lorraine lived the contradiction between her parents’ cosmopolitan world of African American culture and achievement and the hostile White society around them, which did its best to keep upward strivers like the Hansberrys in their designated place. Lorraine’s family was even sued after her father bought their house through a White front man in a neighborhood with restrictive racial covenants.
Carl Hansberry was a real estate speculator; his victory in court enabled him to continue buying buildings in White neighborhoods, chopping apartments into one-room, notoriously overcrowded and unsanitary “kitchenettes,” and renting them at an enormous profit to African American families eager to move up. The glaring disconnect between her family’s civil rights activism and their fortune, made by exploiting other Black people, probably played a role in Lorraine’s move toward Marxist politics, but Shields doesn’t explore it. By contrast, his depiction of her intellectual development is substantive, from her teenage readings in Harlem Renaissance literature through her discovery, at the University of Wisconsin, of theater, in particular Sean O’Casey’s Irish folk dramas. Shields also revisits a summer workshop in Mexico that cemented her commitment to social realism in art and her tenure as a journalist at the radical monthly Freedom after she dropped out of college.
When it comes to her personal and emotional life, however, Shields is regrettably hands-off. He mentions a “crush” on college classmate Edythe Anne Cohen and includes a few excerpts from Hansberry’s letters to Cohen that raise intriguing questions about how intimate they were. One refers to Lorraine’s interest in a “very wonderful young man. (I never thought it possible.)” Given her subsequent marriage to Marxist activist Robert Nemiroff and later lesbian affairs, this moment cries out for consideration of Hansberry’s complicated sexuality. Instead, Shields jumps to the fact that she met the “wonderful young man” through a left-wing group supporting Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace.
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Shields’s capable account of her journalism reminds us just how radical Hansberry was, presciently seeing the struggles of African Americans as part of the global battle by people of color against colonialism. She was an unabashed Marxist and fellow traveler of the Communist Party during the Cold War years, when it was very unpopular and dangerous, and her marriage to Nemiroff was at least, in part, an alliance of politically like-minded people. She also came to rely on him to keep her focused on the literary and dramatic work that she saw as her true calling, and here, too, Shields presents provocative source material without offering much in the way of analysis. He describes as “indulgent” an excerpt from a letter by Nemiroff urging Hansberry to stick to her writing, advice that might well strike other readers, especially female readers, as patronizing and controlling.
The chapters on “A Raisin in the Sun” are Shields’s best, detailing an engrossing narrative of the creation and production of an American classic. Later chapters that chronicle Hansberry’s declining health and difficulties with later plays — “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” and “Les Blancs” — are also compelling. But Shields dodges the question voiced by several of how extensively Nemiroff revised Hansberry’s work when she was dying and after her death. Shields’s statement, “Whether he exceeded his mandate as her literary executor will be left to theater historians and scholars to determine,” feels disingenuous, given that he had access to Hansberry’s manuscripts and the published versions.
Rich in detail if short on commentary, “Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind a Raisin in the Sun” fills a niche on the growing shelf of books devoted to her by offering a solid introduction to this important American artist and social critic.
Wendy Smith is the author of “Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940.”
Lorraine Hansberry
The Life Behind ‘A Raisin in the Sun’
By Charles J. Shields
Henry Holt. 384 pp. $29.99
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