Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Hansberry, Lorraine - C.W.E. Bigsby

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C.W.E. BIGSBY

For all its sympathy, humour and humanity … [A Raisin in the Sun] remains disappointing—the more so when compared with the achievement of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window…. Its weakness is essentially that of much of Broadway naturalism. It is an unhappy crossbreed of social protest and re-assuring resolution. Trying to escape the bitterness of Wright, Hansberry betrays herself into radical simplification and ill-defined affirmation….

[The] central factor of the play is not poverty but indignity and self-hatred. The survival of the family is dependent on their ability to accommodate themselves to the white world. (p. 156)

Hansberry's play is set in the same locale [as Richard Wright's Native Son]. Its sense of desperation is the same…. Yet where Wright created in Bigger Thomas a hardening of the stereotype …, Hansberry, writing some twenty years later, is concerned with demonstrating...

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1. Introduction
2. Brooks Atkinson
3. Tom F. Driver
4. Gerald Weales
5. Harold R. Isaacs
6. Stanley Kauffmann
7. John Cutts
8. Walter Kerr
9. Ossie Davis
10. Arthur France
11. C.W.E. Bigsby
12. Gerald Weales
13. Jordan Y. Miller
14. Martin Gottfried
15. Brendan Gill
16. Walter Kerr
17. Harold Clurman
18. George R. Adams
19. David E. Ness
20. Clive Barnes
21. W. Edward Farrison
22. Julius Lester
23. Bertie J. Powell
24. Copyright

1. Lorraine Hansberry