Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays

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.