People know American playwright Lorraine Vivian Hansberry for her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959).

This writer inspired "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," song of Nina Simone.

She, the first such Black woman, wrote a play, performed on Broadway. Her best known work highlights the lives of Blacks under racial segregation in Chicago. Family of the author struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant and eventually provoking the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?"

Hansberry moved to city of New York and afterward worked at the pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she dealt with intellectuals, such as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggle for liberation and their impact on the world. People identified Hansberry as a lesbian, and several of her works concern sexual freedom, an important topic. She died of cancer at the age of 34 years.