Looking for Lorraine

The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

By: Imani Perry

Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton

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

A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.

Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, 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, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. 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. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” and Imani Perry’s multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.

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

A Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Book for Nonfiction

A 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize Finalist

©2018 Imani Perry (P)2018 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“The steady cadence of Hamilton’s voice creates a mellow, informative, and poised narration of her story. Hamilton is not only informing the listener but also teaching and, most of all, sharing the uncommon details that shaped this energetic woman.... This audiobook is like watching a documentary of someone paving the way for future artist-activists.” (AudioFile Magazine)

“Perry seeks to deepen our appreciation in this richly dimensional portrait of a brightly blazing artist, thinker, and activist.... Perry does not dwell on the minutiae of traditional biographical coverage of what, when, and where, focusing, instead, on who and why, on inner drama rather than exterior events. Mining writings private and published, collecting memories, tracking the reverberations of Hansberry’s personality, words, and actions, and, at times, entering the narrative, Perry illuminates with arresting impact Hansberry’s thoughts, feelings, and revolutionary social consciousness.... Perry’s ardent, expert, and redefining work of biographical discovery brings light, warmth, scope, and enlightening complexity to the spine-straightening story of a brilliant, courageous, seminal, and essential American writer.” (Booklist, starred review)

“Its strongest chapters - on A Raisin in the Sun and Lorraine’s coming into her own as a public intellectual - are masterly syntheses of research and analysis. It’s a joy for devotees to encounter some record of Hansberry’s influences, including the Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey and the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.... Perry makes a welcome case for a fresh assessment of Hansberry’s nondramatic works: her short stories, many published pseudonymously in lesbian magazines, and her many letters and op-eds on politics and literature for The Village Voice and The New York Times.” (The New York Times Book Review)

"An intimate portrait of the artist as a black woman at the crossroads.... Perry infuses the narrative with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm because she believes Hansberry has something to teach us in these ‘complicated times’. Impressively, she tells her subject’s story in a tightly packed 200 pages. Perry also smartly delves into the inspirations for Hansberry’s brilliant A Raisin in the Sun and engagingly explores Hansberry’s profound friendships with James Baldwin and Nina Simone.... Throughout this animated and inspiring biography, Perry reminds us that the ‘battles Lorraine fought are still before us: exploitation of the poor, racism, neocolonialism, homophobia, and patriarchy.’” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

Happy to have found this

I appreciate that Imani Perry was curious enough about Lorraines life to study her story and provide it to the rest of us who are looking for connection to our past. My ancestors didn't speak much of the racism and slights they encountered in the MS delta. I am grateful.
The narrator is okay. Her voice has lilt that makes it go under and down as if wind was coming out of a sail.

Extraordinary book and exquisitely narrated

I will never forget this book. I loved Lorraine Hansberry ever since I was a child dreaming of becoming a writer. This book gave me so much more to love. What an incredible human, artist, and activist she was. This book touched me in such a real way, I had such deep grief in the chapter about her illness and passing, becoming among the mourners of someone I have known to be deceased as long as I’ve known her name. Imani Perry renders her with such aliveness and love that I was taken fully through her life and brought to that grief and then also the inspiration to pick up my pen and write in honor of Ancestor Hansberry. This was a pleasure to read and learn from. I’ll be thinking about this book for quite some time.

The Depth of Lorraine

Wow…who knew? What a woman and story of a life. Thank you, Ms. Perry!

A must read

Do your ears a favor and challenge your thinking. Listen intently to this book you will be glad that you did! I know I am. I learned and I am grateful for the author but more so for the life of Lorraine.

Exquisite!

A lovely, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a stunning & courageous human being, ahead of her time. Lorraine was a worthy member of radical royalty.

Beyond The Raisin

This book goes far beyond Lorraine Hansberry as just the first black female playwright on Broadway, but goes deeper into who she was, who she wasn’t and what she stood for.

Incredible story about an extraordinary person

Imani Perry’s writing brings to the thinking and feeling life of Lorraine Hansberry. Her striving for justice and witness to life through her art is an inspiring story. The reader’s voice is much too muffled. She drops the end of most of the sentences and runs words together. Audible probably could have done better with the engineering to make the normal inflection and level of her voice easier to hear.

Wow great read!

My mind was opened to who Lorraine Hansberry really was. She was a powerhouse and helped to move this country forward!

Radiant

This book, like its subject, was radiant. The story of Lorraine’s life is peopled with familiar names — Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Nina Simone, etc — but even though I’d heard of ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ I didn’t know anything about it or about Lorraine Hansberry. I did not expect to be so gripped by the life of a woman I’d barely heard of. I haven’t read a lot of biographies so I don’t know how common it is to find one that reads like a love letter to its subject. Imani Perry’s language in speaking of Lorraine seems to sing with love for her, and LisaGay Hamilton’s reading of those words is lovely. This single book probably teaches black history of this time period as well as any school course in the country.

I thought I knew

Wow! What a remarkable woman. Imani Perry puts her life into a recognizable frame, not a person who is unreachable but one who was alive in every way like the rest of us. I loved this book.