For all its sympathy, humour and humanity … [A Raisin in the Sun] remains disappointing—the more so when compared with the achievement of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window…. Its weakness is essentially that of much of Broadway naturalism. It is an unhappy crossbreed of social protest and re-assuring resolution. Trying to escape the bitterness of Wright, Hansberry betrays herself into radical simplification and ill-defined affirmation….

[The] central factor of the play is not poverty but indignity and self-hatred. The survival of the family is dependent on their ability to accommodate themselves to the white world. (p. 156)

Hansberry's play is set in the same locale [as Richard Wright's Native Son]. Its sense of desperation is the same…. Yet where Wright created in Bigger Thomas a hardening of the stereotype …, Hansberry, writing some twenty years later, is concerned with demonstrating human resilience. The gulf between the...