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Looking for Lorraine

The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

A new Beacon Classics edition of Imani Perry’s award-winning biography of Lorraine Hansberry, one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the 20th century

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction; Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award; A New York Times Notable Book of 2018

Lorraine Hansberry was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.

After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in a myriad of ways including:

Challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights
Supporting African anti-colonial leaders
And confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters

Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation’s first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry’s extraordinary life—a life that was tragically cut far too short.