Steven R. Carter (Essay Date Fall 1980)

SOURCE: Carter, Steven R. "Commitment amid Complexity: Lorraine Hansberry's Life in Action." MELUS 7, no. 3 (fall 1980): 39-53.

In the following essay, Carter provides a chronology of Hansberry's life and career and describes her dedication to the women's rights movement.

I. Thirty-Four Years

It may seem odd to precede an article with a chronology, but it is odder still that to date no chronology has been published on Lorraine Hansberry. This failure in scholarship is symptomatic of the continuing critical and scholarly neglect of important black artists and especially of Hansberry. During the fifteen years since her death, the only attempt at a formally structured, "lengthy" biography was Catherine Scheader's They Found a Way: Lorraine Hansberry, a recently published seventy-eight page book which (though informative and accurate) was intended for children. Moreover, Robert Nemiroff's informal biography, To Be Young, Gifted and Black...