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Richard M. Leeson. Lorraine Hansberry: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport: Greenwood P, 1997.175 pp. $65-00.
Lorraine Hansberry entered the annals of American theater history in 1959 during the Civil Rights Movement, when her play A Raisin in the Sun became the first by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway and the first by a Black to win the coveted New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Subsequently, A Raisin in the Sun became one of the most produced plays in America, and in the decades following her death in 1965, at the age of 34, the production and publication of other plays such as Les Blancs (most recently), The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? revealed the extent of her literary and social vision. To Be Young, Gifted and Black, an autobiographical compilation of her writings by the late Robert Nemiroff, her former husband and literary executor, popularized aspects of her life. However, no comprehensive bibliography of her writings and secondary sources was published until 1979, when Nemiroff collaborated with Ernest Kaiser of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to produce "A Lorraine Hansberry Bibliography" for the Freedom ways special issue on Hansberry (19.4).
Now, almost two decades later, Richard Leeson, has compiled a new bibliography of sources, Lorraine Hansberry. A Research and Production Sourcebook, gathering in one text a wonderful array of the diverse materials that characterize the life and work of this major American playwright. Written as "a useful reference guide," this...