Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays

The Drinking Gourd/What Use Are Flowers?

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$15.95 US
On sale Dec 13, 1994 | 288 Pages | 9780679755326

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Before her death at age thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry revolutionized American drama with plays that presented the black experience directly, unapologetically, and often with anger. Her work shook the complacency of white audiences even as it laid the ground for subsequent debates about racism, feminism, and African-American struggles for self-determination. In Les Blancs, Hansberry sets a drama of Shakespearean grandeur in the shifting moral terrain of late-colonial Africa, where the anguished hero must choose between two different kinds of loyalty and two fatally opposing codes of conduct. Also included here are The Drinking Gourd, which traces the strangled interdependence of slaves, slave owners, and overseers, and What Use Are Flowers?, a whimsical yet deadly serious fantasy about the aftermath of a nuclear conflagration.
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) electrified the theatrical world with her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, which won the New York Critics Circle Award for the 1958-59 season. Before her tragic death from cancer at the age of 34, she had already produced a remarkable body of work, including The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window and Les Blancs. Her former husband and literary executor, the late Robert Nemiroff, posthumously produced and published her To Be Young, Gifted and Black and the musical Raisin. View titles by Lorraine Hansberry

About

Before her death at age thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry revolutionized American drama with plays that presented the black experience directly, unapologetically, and often with anger. Her work shook the complacency of white audiences even as it laid the ground for subsequent debates about racism, feminism, and African-American struggles for self-determination. In Les Blancs, Hansberry sets a drama of Shakespearean grandeur in the shifting moral terrain of late-colonial Africa, where the anguished hero must choose between two different kinds of loyalty and two fatally opposing codes of conduct. Also included here are The Drinking Gourd, which traces the strangled interdependence of slaves, slave owners, and overseers, and What Use Are Flowers?, a whimsical yet deadly serious fantasy about the aftermath of a nuclear conflagration.

Author

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) electrified the theatrical world with her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, which won the New York Critics Circle Award for the 1958-59 season. Before her tragic death from cancer at the age of 34, she had already produced a remarkable body of work, including The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window and Les Blancs. Her former husband and literary executor, the late Robert Nemiroff, posthumously produced and published her To Be Young, Gifted and Black and the musical Raisin. View titles by Lorraine Hansberry

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