PUFFY AND FLUFFY.(A Raisin in the Sun)(Critical Essay)

"Never in the history of the American theatre had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage," James Baldwin wrote in "Sweet Lorraine," an essay about the 1959 debut of "A Raisin in the Sun" and the play's twenty-nine-year-old first-time author, Lorraine Hansberry, a pioneer for Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and August Wilson, the subsequent high-water marks of African-American drama. Although Broadway musicals had been borrowing and banking on African-American syncopations, choreography, and stars since the early twenties, before Hansberry black people, as Baldwin wrote, had "ignored the theatre because the theatre had always ignored them." "A Raisin ...