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Lorraine Hansberry
1930–1965
The inspiration behind Nina Simone’s song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” Lorraine Hansberry was a writer, playwright, and the first black woman to write a play performed on Broadway.
Her debut, A Raisin in the Sun premiered to critical acclaim in 1959 when Hansberry was only 29-years-old, before going on to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play that year.
Tragically, Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at 34, and it was only posthumously, through her personal and unpublished writings, that she came to be recognized as queer. But in a 1957 letter published in a lesbian magazine and signed simply with her married initials, she described herself as a “heterosexually married lesbian” and offered a searing feminist critique of the institution of marriage.
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