Looking for Lorraine

September 1, 2018

Perry (Ctr. for African American Studies, Princeton Univ.; Prophets of the Hood) writes the first adult biography of playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-65), arguing that although her play, A Raisin in the Sun, is well known, the details of her personal life have been largely obscured owing to her sexuality and radicalism. The daughter of a Chicago real estate developer, Hansberry was not a stellar student but excelled in the arts and creative writing. After moving to New York, she worked under the tutelage of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, researching and writing on black life in the United States and Africa. In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, who was Jewish, but continued to have affairs with women. Perry details the development of A Raisin in the Sun and both the popularity and misinterpretation of the play at the time. She also explores Hansberry's lesser-known works, her relationships with James Baldwin and Nina Simone, and her involvement in the civil rights movement. Perry believes that she would have gone on to even more acclaim had she not died of cancer at age 34. VERDICT A must-read for fans of black and queer history, literary biography, and women's history.--Kate Stewart, Arizona Historical Soc., Tuscon

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2018
Perry (May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem) explores the art and life of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the Sun, about the struggles of an African-American family in mid-century inner-city Chicago, and died at the age of 34 in 1965. “She was one of those great artists whose life rode the wave of some of the most pivotal and complex moments in American history,” Perry writes. “World War II, McCarthyism, civil rights. Lorraine was right in the thick of it, trying to make sense of it all.” Perry also details Hansberry’s activities as a socialist; writes with curiosity and empathy about her complex personal life, including her marriage to a white man, Robert Nemiroff, and her romances with women; and examines the influences upon her of her college-educated parents and mentors, friends such as James Baldwin and Nina Simone, and fellow writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Insightful literary analyses of Hansberry’s writings fit alongside annotations of excerpts from her diaries and admiring and affectionate declarations about her. This book, “less a biography than a genre yet to be named—maybe third-person memoir?”, is an unusual and exceptional encomium to a brilliant writer and thinker.

Starred review from June 1, 2018
She sparked and sparkled, writes Perry of Lorraine Hansberry, who was all of 29 when her best-known work, the Chicago-set play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened on Broadway in 1959. Perry observes, audiences had never before seen the work of a Black playwright and director, featuring a Black cast with no singing, dancing, or slapstick and a clear social message. In spite of Hansberry's subsequent celebrity, knowledge and understanding of her life and her varied and vital body of work have been superficial at best. Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, seeks to deepen our appreciation in this richly dimensional portrait of a brightly blazing artist, thinker, and activist. Inspired, in part, by Alice Walker's 1975 essay reclaiming the until-then forgotten anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, Perry does not dwell on the minutiae of traditional biographical coverage of what, when, and where, focusing, instead, on who and why, on inner drama rather than exterior events. Mining writings private and published; collecting memories; tracking the reverberations of Hansberry's personality, words, and actions; and, at times, entering the narrative, Perry illuminates with arresting impact Hansberry's thoughts, feelings, and revolutionary social consciousness. Beginning with Hansberry's discomfort with her prominent Chicago family's conspicuous privileges and high expectations, Perry sets Hansberry's attunement to racial and economic injustice within the larger story of the city's systemic racism. She then charts Hansberry's navigation of a very different environment at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she sensed that art might enable her to do something meaningful in the world. Her artistic self emerged in concert with her commitment to progressive activism, leading her to Greenwich Village in 1950. There Hansberry worked for Freedom, a newspaper founded by Paul Robeson; studied with W. E. B. Du Bois; embraced communism; came under FBI surveillance; concealed her lesbianism; and married a Jewish leftist, Robert Nemiroff, who supported her writing life and later ensured that her work was preserved.Perry delves into Hansberry's journals, letters, poems, essays, plays, and fiction, including gay stories published under the name Emily Jones. She closely examines Hansberry's crucial friendships with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. Perry notes that a combination of play and seriousness was at the core of her personality, while Hansberry was burdened with depression and driven by a relentless intellectualism. A born political organizer with a richly informed global vision, she was daringly forthright in articulating her radicalism as she fought for genuine equality for black people everywhere. The human condition was Lorraine's obsession and commitment, Perry writes, and how much more she would have accomplished had cancer not cruelly shortened her life. A captivating, independent, many-faceted, far-ahead-of-her-time writer and freedom fighter, Hansberry died at age 34 in 1965. Perry's ardent, expert, and redefining work of biographical discovery brings light, warmth, scope, and enlightening complexity to the spine-straightening story of a brilliant, courageous, seminal, and essential American writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 1, 2018
An intimate portrait of the artist as a black woman at the crossroads.Perry (African-American Studies/Princeton Univ.; May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, 2018, etc.) feels strongly that Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) is an "important writer who has far too little written about her [and]...about her life." This is a deeply personal book, less a biography than perhaps a "third person memoir" or "homage." Perry infuses the narrative with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm because she believes Hansberry has something to teach us in these "complicated times." Impressively, she tells her subject's story in a tightly packed 200 pages. In her early years, Hansberry was radiant. The middle-class girl who grew up on Chicago's South Side wasn't the best student, but she had a "gift for leadership." She displayed a sense of melancholy and loneliness as well as an insatiable intellectual yearning. After briefly attending the University of Wisconsin, she moved to New York, first to Greenwich Village and then Harlem, where she immersed herself in politics and 1950s activism with other intellectuals and artists. She married her partner in the radical left, Robert Nemiroff, in 1953. They divorced, amicably, in 1964, and Nemiroff would remain a friend, caretaker, and champion of her writings and legacy. Perry argues that we must deal head-on with Hansberry's sexuality; it's "unquestionable" that she was a lesbian, and the author discusses it in detail. Perry also smartly delves into the inspirations for Hansberry's brilliant The Raisin in the Sun (kitchenette buildings, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes) and engagingly explores Hansberry's profound friendships with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. In her later years, Hansberry was an American radical; radicalism "was both a passion and a commitment. It was, in fact, a requirement for human decency."Throughout this animated and inspiring biography, Perry reminds us that the "battles Lorraine fought are still before us: exploitation of the poor, racism, neocolonialism, homophobia, and patriarchy."

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