Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Hansberry, Lorraine - Walter Kerr

1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page
4. Tweet This

WALTER KERR

Though Miss Hansberry is frequently guilty [in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window"] of ladling out words with a soup-spoon ("these two implacable pools of cynicism" are simply a man's eyes) and though she has wasted time name-dropping among Village intellectuals …, she has still forced a good many vigorous attitudes through the verbal smog and she sometimes finishes off an exchange as though a skull had been smartly cracked.

What makes her virtues hard to get at is the loose bag in which she has packed them, for all the world like a shopper who has come from a supermarket of false hopes with bundles that won't stay bundled and keep dropping regularly to the floor. The narrative embrace in which she has hoped to hold all her despairs is a thing, spindly, an arbitrary thing. [Sidney Brustein] is a Villager who has stopped believing in causes; he is persuaded, courtesy of Thoreau, to return to the fray in a political cause; he is later persuaded...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

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