(1930-65), black playwright and civil rights activist. Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun (1959; film, 1961), the first play by a black woman to appear on Broadway. She was the youngest American to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for her play, which presented the frustrations of a black family in the Chicago ghetto hoping to move into a white neighborhood. After her early death from cancer, excerpts from Hansberry's letters, journals, and speeches were published in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1969).
