Lorraine Hansberry’s parents’ work as activists brought them into contact with the Black leaders of the day. She was well accustomed to seeing luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and W.E.B. DuBois in her home. Educated in the segregated public schools of the time, she attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison before she moved to New York for “an education of another kind.”
Throughout her life, she stayed dedicated to the values her parents had instilled in her and worked steadfastly for the betterment of Black people. At a picket line protesting the exclusion of Black athletes from college sports, Lorraine met the man she would marry, a white Jewish liberal, Robert Nemiroff. Lorraine worked for Paul Robeson’s radical Black newspaper Freedom until her husband’s career as a musician and songwriter earned enough to support them so that Lorraine could write full-time.
Her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, was a huge hit, winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award as Best Play of the Year in 1959. Hansberry was the youngest American and the first Black person to receive this prize. This proved to be a watershed event; after the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Black actors and writers entered the creative arts in a surge. Lorraine continued to write plays, but in 1963 was diagnosed with cancer. She died six years after winning the Drama Critics’ Award at the age of thirty-four, tragically cutting short her work. Nevertheless, she made huge strides with her play, forever changing “the Great White Way.”
Racism is a device that, of itself, explained nothing. It is simply a means, an invention to justify the rule of some men over others.
From Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry
SELMA LAGERLÖF AND NELLY SACHS making history
In 1909, Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman and the first Swedish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was awarded for her body of work, including the 1891 novel To the Story of Gösta Berling and the 1902 two-volume work of fiction Jerusalem, the chronicle of Swedish peasants who migrated to Jerusalem. Selma was the preeminent Swedish writer of her day and produced an impressive body of work: thirty novels and four biographical narratives. She wasn’t content merely to be the most brilliant novelist of her age, however; she also worked extremely hard at obtaining the release of Jewish writer Nelly Sachs from a Nazi concentration camp. Sachs, inspired by her savior, won the Nobel Prize in Literature herself in 1966!
BARBARA TUCHMAN trailblazer
One of the most respected historians of the twentieth century and the only woman to win a Pulitzer Prize twice, Barbara Tuchman has written first-rate chronicles accessible to readers from every walk of life. The core of her theory of history is that true understanding comes from observing the patterns that are created through an aggregation of details and events. Tuchman has covered topics from the Trojan War to the Middle Ages, the leaders of World War I, and the United States’ problematic involvement in Vietnam. All of her books are known for their narrative power and for her portrayals of the players on the world stage as believable individuals.
Born in 1912, Barbara Tuchman attended Radcliffe College and, after graduation, took her first job as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo. She began writing articles for several periodicals and went on to work as a staff editorial assistant at the Nation and a correspondent for London’s New Statesman. From 1934 to 1945, Tuchman worked for the Far East News Desk and Office of War Information. Here, she got firsthand experience of researching and writing about history as it happened.
Tuchman put this invaluable wartime experience to good use with her immense study of the pivotal events prior to World War I, The Guns of August, published in 1962. This thoughtful and thorough history of the thirty days leading up to the first global war spanned all of Europe, detailing the actions of key players in London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Paris. Her book was met with thundering critical praise and acceptance from popular readers and historians the world over—she received her first Pulitzer Prize for this powerful exposé.
Barbara Tuchman’s other books include A Distant Mirror, which explores everyday life in fourteenth-century France, and The March of Folly, an analysis of four conflicts in world history that were mismanaged by governments, from the Trojan War to Britain’s loss of her colonies to Vietnam. Her second Pulitzer Prize was for a biography of US General Joseph Stilwell: a probing look at the relations between China and the United States through the personal wartime experiences of Stilwell.
To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
Barbara Tuchman
RACHEL CARSON “The Natural World…Supports All Life”
World-famous pioneering ecologist and science writer Rachel Carson turned nature writing on its head. Before she came along, notes Women Public Speakers in the United States, “the masculine orientation [to the subject] emphasized either the dominant, aggressive encounter of humanity with wild nature or the distancing of nature through scientific observation.” By creating a different, more feminine relationship to nature, Rachel Carson portrayed humans as part of the great web of life, separate only in our ability to destroy it. In a very real sense, Carson not only produced the first widely read books on ecology, but laid the foundation for the entire modern environmental movement.
Rachel inherited her love of nature from her mother, Maria, a naturalist at heart, who took Rachel for long walks in woods and meadows. Born in 1907, Rachel was raised on a farm in Pennsylvania, where the evidence of industry was never too far away. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Pennsylvania had changed a great deal from the sylvan woodlands named for colonialist William Penn. Coal and strip mines had devastated some of the finest farmland. Chemical plants, steel mills, and hundreds of factories were belching pure evil into the air.
As she grew, Rachel’s love of nature took an unexpected turn toward oceanography, a budding science limited by technological problems for divers. The young girl was utterly fascinated by this biological science, and though she majored in English and loved to write, she heard the ocean’s siren song increasingly. While studying at the Pennsylvania College for Women in the mid-1920s, she changed her major to zoology, despite the overwhelming advice of her professors to stay the course in English, a much more acceptable major for a young woman. Her advisors were quite correct in their assertions that women were blocked from science; there were very few teaching positions except at the handful of women’s colleges and even fewer job prospects for women outside of academia.
However, Rachel listened to her heart and graduated with high honors, a fellowship to study at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory for the summer, and a full scholarship to Johns Hopkins University in Maryland to study marine zoology. Rachel’s first semester in graduate school coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression. Her family lost their farm, and her parents and brother came to live with her in her tiny campus apartment. She helped make ends meet with part-time teaching at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland while continuing her studies.
In 1935, Rachel’s father suffered a heart attack and died quite suddenly. Rachel looked desperately for work to support her mother and brother, but no one would hire a woman as a full-time university science professor. Brilliant and hardworking, Rachel was encouraged to teach grade school, or better yet, be a housewife, because it was “inappropriate” for women to work in science.
Finally, her unstinting efforts to work in her field were ultimately rewarded by a job writing radio scripts for Elmer Higgins at the United States Bureau of Fisheries—a perfect job for her because it combined her strength in writing with her scientific knowledge. Then a position opened up at the bureau for a junior aquatic biologist. The job was to be awarded to the