To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry

To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry

"Anyone who has ever wondered what it really means to be Black will find the answer in this book."--MINNEAPOLIS TRIBUNE

To Be Young, Gifted and Black is a special kind of autobiography, in a very special voice. Both the story and the voice belong to a young woman from Chicago who moved to New York, won fame with her first play, A Raisin in the Sun--and went on to new heights of artistry before her tragically early death.

In turns angry, loving, bitter, laughing, and defiantly proud, the story, voice, and message are all Lorraine Hansberry's own, coming together in one of the major works of the Black experience in mid-twentieth-century America.


"A milestone."--TIME

"Wonderfully moving and entertaining."--Clive Barnes, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"I advise anybody who is interested in the human condition, black or white, to read it."--NEWSDAY

Lorraine Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year at the age of twenty-nine, making her the youngest American, fifth woman, and first black playwright to do so. Her novel A Raisin in the Sun has been published and produced in more than 30 countries, and her film adaptation was nominated for Best Screenplay by New York critics and won a Cannes Film Festival Award. Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer at the age of thirty-four, during the run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Her renown has only grown in the years since her death. To Be Young, Talented, and Black, a dramatic biography of the writer told in her own words, was the longest-running Off-Broadway drama of 1969, and has been recorded, filmed, and expanded into a book, as well as touring an unprecedented forty states and two hundred universities.

During the 25th anniversary stage staging of A Raisin in the Sun by the Roundabout Theatre in New York City in 1986, the play was universally regarded as one of the greatest American classics. The PBS American Playhouse TV adaptation of the 25th-anniversary version garnered one of the greatest viewing crowds in PBS history when it premiered in 1990. Les Blancs, her final play, which was produced posthumously on Broadway and subsequently in notable regional theaters, has been acclaimed as her best by a number of critics.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780451531780
ISBN 10	0451531787
Title	To Be Young, Gifted and Black
Author	Lorraine Hansberry
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Putnam Inc
Year published	2011-01-04
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.