Les Blancs Read Free Page B

his private commitment.
    I am grateful to Max Eisen, Bob’s press agent, who has never failed to answer any call from me for advice or help. And my friends Lovette Harper and Sophie and Joe LaRusso for fidelity.
    And Edith Gordon, Bob’s—and my—more than friend and mentor, who spoiled him shamelessly because she loved him.
    Finally my family: I am grateful to the Nemiroffs who closed ranks around me on my husband’s death to uplift and sustain me.My special thanks to Mili and Leo; David and Helene; David Lyons and Sandra Nemiroff Lyons, and Matthew Lyons.
    My sister, Hattie Handy Manning, who has always promptly undertaken to support whatever I have attempted to do through the years; my brother, Albert Handy, his wife, Cathy and children Alicia, Cathy, Albert, and Lizzie; and my nephew Paul Nunn and his wife, Vanessa, for their care. Thanks also to Marty Nunn.
    Multifold gratitude to our daughter, Joi Gresham, creative in her own right and imbued with a sense of purpose and direction of which Bob was very proud. Thanks also to my son-in-law, Timothy Conant, and joyous appreciation to my grandchildren Joshua Malik Gresham-Conner and Mariah Jewell Gresham-Conant for existing.
    Lastly, my deep gratitude to my husband’s closest friends, who have helped to fill the void in my life: Dr. Burton D’Lugoff, who loved Lorraine Hansberry and Robert Nemiroff and fought vainly in the final illness of each to wrest each back to this side of life. Thanks also to his wife, Marian, who supported him and us.
    And to Ann and Ernie Lieberman, who are always by my side with laughter, and nostalgia, warm memories, and a zest for life that is contagious and an ongoing tribute to Bob, whom they loved, and to me, whom they welcomed into so beautiful and charmed a circle.
    —J EWELL H ANDY G RESHAM N EMIROFF
Croton-on-Hudson, New York

May 1994

INTRODUCTION
    The Black Arts movement of the 1960s seemed to burst on the American theatrical scene with no warning. The plays of LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Ed Bullins, and others appeared, it seemed, from nowhere, called forth from hidden reserves of anger deep within the black community. Few had recognized the strains of militance in the earlier voice of Lorraine Hansberry. Only in hindsight do we now realize that Hansberry heralded the new movement and, in fact, became one of its major literary catalysts. The commercial success and popularity of her first play masked her radical politics and seemed to align her with “integrationism” rather than the muscular voice of Malcolm X. Suppression of other works robbed the public of her insights and her warnings of the cataclysmic civic revolts to come. However, writings that emerged after her death confirmed the vigor of her challenge to the status quo. Only now, in retrospect, do we begin to comprehend her significance as an American, a black, and a woman writer.
    She was born in 1930 and died of cancer in 1965. Yet during her scant thirty-four years of life, she made an indelible mark on American theater. She was the first black playwright and the youngest of any color to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best Play of the Year, earning it for her first play,
A Raisin in the Sun
. The drama, which opened on Broadway in 1959, was a landmark success and was subsequently translated into over thirty languages on all continents, including the language of the former East Germany’s Sorbische minority, and produced in such diverse countries as the former Czechoslovakia, England, France, Kenya, the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and Japan. The play became a popular film in 1961, a Tony Award-winning musical in 1973, and a highlysuccessful television drama produced on American Playhouse in 1989, starring Danny Glover and Esther Rolle.
    Her brief life yielded five plays (one of which was completed by her former husband and literary executor, the late Robert Nemiroff), and more than sixty magazine and newspaper articles, plays, poems,