TY - BOOK AU - Hansberry,Lorraine AU - Godfrey,Mollie TI - Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry T2 - Literary conversations series SN - 9781496829634 PY - 2021/// CY - Jackson PB - University Press of Mississippi KW - Hansberry, Lorraine, KW - African American women dramatists KW - Interviews KW - Women dramatists, American N1 - Includes bibliographical references and index; Introduction -- Chronology -- Raisin author tells meaning of her play / Lorraine Hansberry -- A playwright, a promise: Lorraine Hansberry reveals a major talent in the forthcoming A Raisin in the Sun / Faye Hammel -- Housewife's play is a hit / Sidney Fields -- We have so much to say / Ted Poston -- Ex-UW co-ed becomes "The Toast of New York" / Jack Gaver -- Talk of the town: playwright / Lillian Ross -- Interview with Lorraine Hansberry, Peter Glenville, Dore Schary, José Quintero, Lloyd Richards, and Arthur Laurents / David Susskind -- The protest, part I / Rev. William Hamilton -- Unaired interview with Lorraine Hansberry / Mike Wallace -- Interview with Lorraine Hansberry / Studs Terkel -- An author's reflection: Willy Loman, Walter Lee, and He Who Must Live / Lorraine Hansberry -- Five writers and their African ancestors, part II: Lorraine Hansberry / Harold R. Isaacs -- The negro in American culture: interview with James Baldwin, Emile Capouya, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Alfred Kazin / Nat Hentoff -- Interview with Lorraine Hansberry, Leo Genn, Reginald Gardiner, and Elizabeth Seal / Mitch Miller -- Interview with Lorraine Hansberry / Patricia Marx -- Images and essences: 1961 dialogue with an uncolored egghead containing wholesome intentions and some sass / Lorraine Hansberry -- Interview with Lorraine Hansberry and Lloyd Richards / Frank Perry -- Interview with Lorraine Hansberry / Eleanor Fischer -- Miss Hansberry and Bobby K: birthweight low, jobs few, death comes early / Diane Fisher -- The black revolution and the white backlash: a town hall forum / Association of Artists for Freedom -- A Lorraine Hansberry rap / Lerone Bennett Jr. and Margaret G. Burroughs -- Key resources N2 - "Spanning from the debut of A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway in 1959 to her early death from cancer in January 1965, Lorraine Hansberry's short stint in the public eye changed the landscape of American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry (1930-1965) became both the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the first to win the prestigious New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Resonating deeply with the aims of the civil rights movement, Raisin also ushered in a new era of black representation on the stage and screen, displacing the cartoonish stereotypes that were the remnants of blackface minstrelsy in favor of complex three-dimensional portrayals of black characters and black life. Hansberry's public discourse in the aftermath of Raisin's success also disrupted mainstream critical tendencies to diminish the work of black artists, helping pave the way for future work by black playwrights. Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry is the first volume to collect all of her substantive interviews in one place, including many radio and television interviews that have never before appeared in print. The twenty-one interviews collected here-ranging from just before the Broadway premier of A Raisin in the Sun to less than six months before Hansberry's death-offer an incredible window into Hansberry's aesthetic and political thought. In these conversations, Hansberry explores many of the questions most often put to black writers of the mid-twentieth century-including everything from her thinking about the relationship between art and protest, universality and particularity, and realism and naturalism, to her sense of the relationship between black intellectuals and the black masses, integration and Black Nationalism, and African American and Pan-African liberation. Taken together, these interviews reveal the insight, intensity, and eloquence that made Hansberry such a transformative figure in American letters"-- ER -