Summary

The play, ”A Raisin in the Sun”, was written by Lorraine Hansberry and published in 1959. The play is divided into three acts and is about an African-American family and their challenges in life.

The Youngers are a family living in Chicago sometime in the late 1940s or 1950s. The family consists of Lena Younger, or Mama as she is called, her two children Beneatha and Walter Younger, Walters’s wife Ruth, and their son Travis. They all live together in a small and dark two-bedroom apartment.

The Youngers have financial difficulties, live very close together, share a bathroom with the other people in the block, struggle to keep cockroaches out of their small kitchen and generally work hard to get by. Travis, the son of Walter and Ruth, even sleeps in the living room which also functions as a dining room. Walter Lee is a driver for a rich white man, while Ruth and Mama do d...