Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun by Charles J. Shields

While Lorraine Hansberry lived only  34 years, her play A Raisin in The Sun has had a lasting impact on the American theatre. In Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun by Charles J. Shields, the author chronicles the life of the playwright and activist. Called “the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage,” students across America were led to believe that Hansberry based her famous play on her own life. Well, she did, kind of.

Actually, her father Carl Hansberry was a bit of a scoundrel. Yes, the Hansberrys were not welcome in a white neighborhood, but they had their real home in a black neighborhood, while they masqueraded in this second home.  This episode was part of a scheme to drive whites away so Carl could purchase property cheaply and  could start chopping up floors, turning apartments into one-room “kitchenettes” to make more money for the landlord, which eventually he became. About 10% of the book covers his moneymaking slumlord schemes, which projected the Hansberrys into the middle class. He also became so enamored with suing other folks that the Chicago branch of the NAACP began backing away from him after he threatened to sue Goldblatt’s department stores.

No doubt legitimate Raisin stories happened due to restrictive covenants designed to keep black homeowners out of white neighborhoods, but Raisin was not truly the Hansberry situation. The wealth generated with Hansberry Sr.’s property speculation schemes enabled the lifestyle that Lorraine was able to enjoy including some college attendance and a regular check from her widowed mother to help support Lorraine’s New York City lifestyle. Besides playwriting, she kept her day job writing for and performed a number of other duties for a newspaper called Freedom.

The biography broadens the scope of Lorraine’s life from the sliver as playwright that students in America learned when studying Raisin to all her activities in social causes. She campaigned for Progressive Party candidate Henry A. Wallace and  had close Communist ties, which caused J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to keep an eye on her for fear she would become, “in the language of counterintelligence, a ‘present danger.’” By the end of her short life, Lorraine would have thousands of pages in her FBI dossier.

Regarding her personal life, Shields takes a hard look at the man Lorraine married, Bobby Nemiroff, a Jewish-Russian activist, a Communist card-carrying one. Shields described their marriage as a codependency. He was Lorraine’s best friend, her critic, and her promoter. They would remain tied even after their divorce, and he went on to manage her estate after her death.

Charles J. Shields is the author of two biographies about Harper Lee, one for adults, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, and for young readers, I Am Scout: The Biography of Harper Lee. He is known for his well-documented biographies.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting December 16, 2021.

I would like to thank Henry Holt & Company and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.