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The History of Literature
728 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (#20 GBOAT) | Lorraine Hansberry - RECLAIMED
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The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello everyone. The History of Literature Podcast is going on tour next spring. I'll be going with a small group of travelers to London, Oxford and Bath where we will visit the land of Dickens, Shakespeare, Jane Austen and more. A trip to Remember if you're interested in learning more about how you can join. You can check out the itinerary@historyofliterature.com or by visiting our partner at John Shores Travel. That's Shores without an E. Or just send me an email@jack wilsonauthormail.com that's J, A C K E. Wilson Wilson, Author, Gmail.com let's give ourselves something to look forward to in 2026. We would love to see you there. New season, new chaos in college football. Big stage, big opportunity. This Labor Day weekend, the wildness lives on ABC, ESPN and the all new ESPN app. What a way to start. Featuring top 10 teams like Clemson, Notre Dame, Alabama and ls you and Bill Belichick's debut at North Carolina. It's so special. These teams collide. Don't miss a lineup filled with electric matchups. Welcome back to College Football Kickoff Week presented by Modelo. Labor Day weekend on ESPN and abc. Also available to stream on the all new ESPN app. Hello. Today on the podcast, we continue our march up the list of the greatest books of all time with a look at number 20, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. We hear from a listener whose passion for reading can bring him to tears. And we reclaim another episode that fell out of our archives. A look at the brief and wondrous life of Lorraine Hansberry, author of the play A Raisin in the Sun. That's all coming up today on the history of literature. Hello. Hello, hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson reporting from Crazy Town. And by crazy Town, I mean Washington, D.C. and by reporting, I mean hiding in my basement and ignoring the sounds of the house crashing down around me. The walls of the house. Edgar Allan Poe would have approved. He would also, I think, approve of our topics today. Or, well, maybe not. He was a complicated guy. We don't know what he thought of Mark Twain. Although their lives overlapped, their writing careers did not. Twain was younger. Poe died when Twain was 13. We do know what Mark Twain thought of Poe. He called his prose nearly unreadable, although he liked it somewhat better than Jane Austen's. Not by much. Mark Twain was. This is an aside. Mark Twain was so cruel in his comments about Jane Austen. He said something like, I can't believe they allowed her to die a natural death. Which is simply ridiculous. I can't really defend the prose of Edgar Allan Poe, but I can defend the prose of Jane Austen. I don't know what Twain was thinking, why he found it so unreadable, but I suspect he was objecting to her popularity. She was a woman and British and wrote about a different sort of people, sort of person, different set of people. I should say Twain's territoriality may have kicked in there some self defensiveness. Well, Twain was wrong, which is okay. Even Homer nodded. But we're celebrating Twain today and the achievement of his book, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. One of the strong candidates for the great American novel and number 20 on the list we're consulting of the greatest books of all time. Does it belong on this list? It's a controversial pick. The book is frequently banned by sources or banners or for causes. Maybe I should say both coming from the left and the right. We'll get into that. And we explored Huck Finn and Twain a few weeks ago in our episode featuring Shelley Fisher Fishkin and her book the Lives and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade. So I'll try not to repeat myself too much today, dig into some different topics. I encourage you all to check out that episode because Shelley Fisher Fishkin is one of our leading Mark Twain scholars. And we also cover some other recent Mark Twain developments and our current stance or stances regarding Huck Finn and Jim in particular. I have some ideas about how best to read and understand this book, but let's just put some basics and some of the pros and cons on the table. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884 and 1885 when Twain was approaching 50 years of age. It was a sequel of sorts, coming after about a decade after the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where Huck appears. I read Tom Sawyer over and over when I was a kid. For a kid in the 70s and 80s, the book still held up pretty well. I didn't literally play marbles or paint a fence or whitewash a fence, but the kinds of things that they did that those kids were up to were pretty close to how things were for me. Rural Missouri in the 1830s and 40s, it turned out, was not that different from small town Wisconsin 130 or so years later for a kid. We also went exploring and we sometimes got dangerously far away from home. We played games in the woods and the Fields, caves, if we could find one. We did things like catching bugs and then charging admission to the bug museum to the neighbor kids. Come and see our bug museum. 10 cents. That's not in Tom Sawyer, but it could be. And there's so much inventiveness in there. The way Tom sees his own funeral, the way he tricks people into washing the fence. The Sunday school tickets he trades for a Bible even though he hasn't memorized any Bible verses. It's all so memorable. Becky Thatcher and Joe Harper. Huck appears and he's vivid and memorable too. But Tom is the star of that show. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer flopped at first, but then it became a bestseller and helped increase Mark Twain's fame. But nobody ever talks about Tom Sawyer as the. As the greatest American novel. No one ranks it on the list of all time greatest books. No one seriously questions whether the Adventures of Tom Sawyer might be a better or more important book than Huck Finn. As pleasurable as the storytelling is, we know what the deficiency of Tom Sawyer is and we see it. When Tom Sawyer, the character shows up in Huckleberry Finn's book, Tom Sawyer is essentially, how should I put it? The narrator. Or we could maybe say the author is saying, look at this. Here's a wised up kid surrounded by people he's a little smarter than, a little sharper than. It's not a mature book. Tom's not a mature character. He's an idealized version of a boy in a boyhood that we're invited to admire. It's entertaining, but it's not very ambitious. With the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain goes after something much deeper. It's often said that the character of Tom Sawyer ruins the novel Huck Finn, that when he shows up, things get less fun. Which would maybe surprise Twain to hear that a bit. I always get the sense that, that he thinks Tom is loads of fun. Maybe, maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe Twain was in on the joke too. Maybe he saw that Tom would come across as cruel and immature, a bit of a bully when he appears. And maybe Twain was trying to convey that to us, to let us see the contradiction. When you juxtapose Tom Sawyer, the merry prankster and maybe a little more connected to civilization when you, when you contrast that with Huck Finn and where he was at that point in his own journey, because that's what happens. That's what we get. That's the impression that I think a lot of readers get is man barefoot Huck is a lot more Fun, a lot more charming, a lot more compelling than Tom, who's got a little more of the civilization in him. That's the beauty of the novel Huck Finn. It shows a boy's growth against a background of a corrupt society, a hypocritical society, a stained society. And as we root for him to grow and become self aware, we see how the forces of that society are pushing him toward accepting hypocrisy, accepting cruelty, accepting ignorance. We don't want Huck to start horsing around with Tom. We want him to continue his relationship with Jim, just Jim. That's where Huck grows. There's a streak of this with Huck and Jim on the raft, away from towns and people and civilization. And with Huck heading west at the end, where he's avoiding civilization, he says, I've been civilized before, I'm going to avoid it now. We think, yes, get away, get away, get away and be free. Literally. Freedom for Jim. His freedom is at stake. The book takes place before the Civil War. Jim is a slave, but freedom for Huck too. That world where slave owning is a given is a world where Huck's not going to be free either. When we had the novelist Yang Wang here. Who. The woman who grew up in China, novelist, she said something I've never forgotten. She said, I can't write in Chinese. I don't trust myself with the words. I don't trust the words, the language. It's a language that for her was too full of distortion, too full of slanted meanings, too full of propaganda and lies. The words themselves were not reliable. That's how I feel about Huck in pre Civil War America. And it's how I think Twain came to view his own childhood and past. All of these myths and legends and lies designed to support the unsupportable. And you hear them from judges and ministers and teachers and policemen and all the pillars of society, but they were wrong. You hear them from presidents, founding fathers. It's not an easy thing to rip all of that away and say, I have a conscience. I need to follow instead against everything I've been taught, but I can see right from wrong. That's Twain's personal journey. And he makes that Huck's journey. And we readers float along with him. And Twain has a very special way of delivering this so that we know he's right without him needing to tell us that he's right. We talked about this in the episode with Shelley Fisher Fishkin, so I won't repeat the famous passage where Huck decides that he'll go to hell. Instead, we'll focus on a different piece of writing to show Twain's method at work. This was his response to one of the first bannings of the book, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Like I said, it's often banned by both the right and the left. The right says, hey, we don't like this view of a kid who's questioning slavery. The left says, hey, the N word is in here way too often. And by the way, for a book that's supposedly anti racist, this guy Jim talks in a stereotypical way and is not really a fully developed character. At times he seems more like a prop. So let's give this one a pass. I'll talk a little bit more about that objection in a bit. And then there's an objection that I think we've moved beyond now. But I think this was the objection that was animating the library in Concord, Massachusetts, which was one of the first places to ban the book, which is astonishing that it was Concord and the Public Library of Brooklyn, another place. That's kind of. Kind of surprising that they. That they banned the book. And why were they doing this? In the late 19, late 19th and early 20th centuries, they objected to the book's coarseness. I don't think these were early versions of what today we might call political correctness regarding the N word or Jim's stereotypical speech or flatness of his character. They didn't ban Tom Sawyer. And that has an equally troubling stretch with a character called Injun Joe. But that book is told in the third person, and Huck Finn, famously, importantly, is told in the first person in the vernacular. It's why Hemingway and T.S. eliot and Faulkner and all kinds of people viewed Twain as a father of American literature, a transformational figure, and Huck Finn in particular as the book that changed everything. Writing in natural speech, in American dialogue, in local, regional dialogue, it was setting aside the Jane Austens of the prose world and saying, here's who we are. This is how we talk. And this can also take on great topics, literary topics. We can explore things like race relations or the evils at the heart of the American experiment. We can take on slavery with a voice that isn't that of a. A minister or an Emersonian style essayist, but a boy, a kid, a grungy and uneducated kid trying to sort out right from wrong, but also busy surviving his own family issues and wrestling with life on the Mississippi River. So Concord, Massachusetts, home of Emerson and Thoreau and the Alcotts. One of the great enlightened places on the planet, supposedly. And here the public library banned Huck Finn and Louisa May Alcott herself, who we saw in our episodes we've done on her, that she was a devoted abolitionist and yet she was one of the ones who objected to the book, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Coarseness was the word they used. The book was coarse. More suited for the slums, they said, than it was to intelligent, respectable people. The veriest trash. Inelegant and not elevating. What they seem to be objecting to here is that kids will read it and start talking like Huck, I guess, using words like ain't, dropping their GS, going barefoot, smoking a corn cob pie. I don't know. I'm guessing. I'm guess they didn't give more details. Stealing pies from back windows, going hobo. Is that what they were worried about, skipping school? Louisa May Alcott said that if he. Meaning Twain, this is her quote. Couldn't. If he could not think of something better to tell our pure minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them. End quote. Come on. He had best stop writing for them. I like Louisa May Alcott. And I liked her more when we did those episodes on her not too long ago. I learned what a badass she actually was. But come on, that's the kind of passage that makes me want to time travel so I can go debate the good people of Concord of the Concord, Massachusetts Public Library Board because they seem to think books are supposed to be like grammar books or textbooks or Bibles. They don't see. They don't see how Twain smuggled in his meaning under the COVID no pun intended, undercover, like a pirate sailing under a false flag. Only in this case, it's kind of the opposite. It's like the heroes who fly under a pirate flag and then turn out to be good. The book may look coarse, but it's the greatest of literature. It makes you think and it makes you feel. Twain's response when Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Public Library banned the book in the early 20th century in his response to. They objected to a passage where Huck not only itched, but scratched. End quote. Which they considered obscene. And I don't even understand what they're talking about there. Not only itched, but scratched. Are they talking about masturbation? I missed that. And I went back through the text and did a control F on scratched and itched. And I think I found the passage that they're talking about, but I think it's a horrible misreading, unless I'm missing something. But anyway, they viewed the book as vulgar and obscene and vulgar. Twain was asked to respond and here's what he said. I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for adults exclusively. And it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. Let me pause there. I was surprised to read this because I didn't know that that Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for adults exclusively. I know that Huck Finn is a book that adults kind of enjoy more because they get it more. But I thought they were written for boys and I thought that Tom Sawyer especially was written for boys. And then guess what? The passage continues and it turns out Mark Twain is the master fisherman. He even got this old fish, Jack Wilson, to swallow his bait because now he has set the hook. Let's go back to the quote. Remember, he says, the mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. He says, I know this by my own experience and to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. End quote. That's the Twain move. There we go. He does this so well. It's like when he says there are many humorous things in the world. Among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages. Or even something simpler like never put off till tomorrow what can be done the day after tomorrow. The first half of that we think, oh, here we go. Some conventional wisdom, a nod to authority. He's going to remind us of the saying like a school marm or a Sunday school teacher or an almanac writer. Never put off till tomorrow what can be done today. Ho ho ho. How elevating. I'm sure the good people on the board of the Concord Public Library would have approved. Betwain Twain then twists it and says, what can be done the day after tomorrow? And if you think about it, if you really think about it, isn't he saying, hey, maybe procrastination is not so bad? If something can be postponed for two days, why tackle it before then? Surely you have better things to do. And if you Never get around to it. Well, maybe you lived a fuller life with those other things. He slides that in. That meaning that making you think. In this response to the Brooklyn Public Library, we think he's going to tell us, oh, gee, you're right. I meant those for adults. I'm greatly troubled to hear that children have read those books. They're not for kids. My goodness, there's coarse language in there. It's inelegant, it's violent, it's vulgar. It's. It's not elevating. I should know better than to write something for those pure minded lads and lasses. But instead, instead he inserts the knife and he twists it. Or he doesn't even need to twist it because our squirming does all the work. He's saying, yeah, Huck Finn is vulgar, violent, obscene. Have you read the holiest book imaginable? There's no more book that our society reveres as holy more than the Bible. Well, guess what? There's sex in there too. People, affairs, violence. Nobody ever says the Bible is inelegant. Elevating what could be. What could be more so called elevating? It literally is a book supposed to prepare people to ascend to heaven. That's what Twain says. And it was forced upon us as children. It's the example tongue in cheek that makes the point better than if Twain were to argue the point explicitly. If he said something like the Bible has obscene references too, he'd be in a debate about why did you call the Bible obscene? Or he'd be criticized for comparing his novel with a holy text. Or who are you to compare yourself with the book of God, some such thing. Instead he just. He concedes the point. Oh, right. Let's consider the children. I'm on my fainting couch too. Those pure minds must not be sullied. Only, gee, we do compel them to read the Bible, which has all kinds of obscenities in it. There's sex. There's a lot of sex in the Bible. So what are we really doing here? Are we worried about them reading this stuff too early or not? And here's where I want to read a listener email on another slightly different topic, which I'm then going to combine with what we're talking about today. This came in after our recent episode where we talked about Edith Wharton and Patrick o' Brien with the novelist Olivia Wolfgang Smith. Patrick o' Brien sometimes gets lumped in with genre writers or specialty writers, but I'm telling you, for people who've really gotten into the books. Like me, they are an incredible literary experience. And so too for our listener Rick, who discussion of Patrick O' Brien and the Aubrey Maturan novels in episode 725 touched me deeply. I was introduced to O' Brien and his novels by Lewis Lapham as the subject of his Notebook column Stupor mundy in the April 2000 edition of Harper's Magazine shortly after O' Brien's death. A wonderful article by a wonderful man about an extraordinary author. Lapham comments, quote, I know of no other set of books in which I take such unqualified delight. End quote. Lewis also goes on to say that when he recommends the series to a friend, he does so always with the advice that they allow an interval of at least six months before proceeding from one voyage to the next. Advice that I immediately took to heart. For 10 years, I would return to the series as though I were returning to old friends. Your discussion of this series 15 years after having completed it brought tears to my eyes. Stupor Mundi applies not only to o', Brien, but to Lapham as well. Keep up the great work, Rick. Now, why am I bringing this up? Because I found this passage moving. Here's Rick reading these books, pacing them out over the course of 10 years. And the memory of that experience was so strong that even now, 15 years later, he could be moved to tears. And I think, oh my. My goodness, 15 years. What a long time. Then I realized that I last read one of the Patrick o' Brien books when my younger son was a baby, an infant. I finished the series while holding him in my arms. I'd read it while he was taking naps, and he. He. The baby just turned 18 and is now headed off to college in a couple of weeks. So I guess it's been 15 or more years for me, too, since I've read them. And yet they're vivid. But Rick's experience is the one, the reader's experience is the one that moved me when I read his email. This is what I want from literature. This is what I want literature to be for me and for you, dear listener, and for everyone. It's about those experiences, you and the book. Entering the vivid, continuous dream, letting the world carry you away and stretch out your soul, Your mind racing, your heart expanding. You rejoin the real world afterwards, panting and eager, looking around, seeing things with new eyes. Because you've changed. You laughed a little, you cried a little, you learned a little, or a lot. And now you're seeing the world in a slightly different way. It's better and richer, not because the world has changed, but because you've changed. And it's why I'm so glad I'm not on the board of a library or the faculty of an English department or wrestling with which books should be taught. Required reading is tough. Literature is too good and necessary and essential to leave out altogether. But all of these books, if they're any good, can also be read in the wrong way for the wrong reasons or to draw the wrong conclusions. And guess what? That's what teachers are for. But you can see where a teacher might say, hey, I'm kind of swimming against a stream on this one. I'm trying to teach them that it's about. It's about racism, but they can't get past the N word. I'm trying to teach them, trying to explain to them X. But they only see. Yes. And if you're a librarian and you have it on the shelf and you don't even have a teacher who's going to accompany the reader, you can see where they might think, well, space is limited. Resources are finite. We have to make. I'm not in favor of banning books, but choices have to be made. If you told me that my kids were going to spend the year reading two books in a literature class and the two books were Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and in between they can read all the Penthouse magazines that they want, I'd be at the school board meeting demanding to know what was going on. I admit my values. My First Amendment commitment to free speech has got some limits. And if the response at that school board meeting was unsatisfying, I guess I'd put my house up for sale. That's not how I want my kids to grow up in that community with that teacher. And others might feel just as passionately about a classroom that's reading Huck Finn. Maybe the teacher will struggle to explain all the passages and all the many uses of the N word to put it all in context. And if you get kids who are reading it the wrong way, or maybe the kid is. Maybe the teacher is worried about the treatment of Jim or. And to say, well, look, look, as adults, we say, well, even if this is bad, it provokes our discussion. This is what I say about Lolita. This doesn't. This doesn't wanna. This isn't intended to turn me into a pedophile. It makes me think about what's going on in Lolita and this uncomfortable feeling I have that I root for Humbert Humbert, because of his. His narrative voice. But that's. I'm an adult. We can read a book, even a flawed book, and learn from the flaws. Or we can say, I see what the author is doing here and I'm going to have this experience and it's going to make me stronger. We could say that this word offends my ear and we're not worried that we'll become racist. We can say, Jim is a shallow character and that's a weakness of the novel, not something that's inevitable because Jim, as a black person, must not have had a full inner life. We can do that ourselves. And teachers can help classrooms see those things. And so there are good arguments both for including books if you have the time and the context to put the novel in its time and its context. Or there's an argument for trying a different book if that book is going to work better. What you don't want to do is let the concern that we talk about when we talk about required reading or books in the canon or books that should be or should not be on a syllabus. We don't want to let that concern bleed over into a concern about the book for readers who are not part of a school or academy to act like, well, this is the book's fault. To act like it's not something, you know, we shouldn't sully our eyes with this book because if we do that, if we go on that path, we won't have any books about serious and difficult top. Everything will be bland porridge. We'll lose passages like the ones in Huck Finn that might make us think about slavery and its impact on young people like Huc or on Twain himself, who lived through it. Obviously, we want books that are about slavery and the impact on the slaves. We see the cruelty, we see the humanity, we see the struggle. But seeing slavery's impact on Huck also shows the hypocrisy, the twisted logic, the bizarro world of white supremacy cloaked in the guise of Christianity, of all things. And that's valuable, too. It's what literature does. It's what literature is for. Okay, my thanks to Rick for sending me that email. There's more to Huck Finn than what we've covered. He originally escaped from his father, Pap, an abusive drunk who wants Huck to quit school and stop trying to educate himself. And there's a Duke and a King, a pair of con artists. We haven't talked about them. And there's the widow Douglas, who's intending to help civilize Huck. There are adventures. There's the Mississippi river and the raft. It's full of. The book is full of things for adults and yes, kids too. The pure minded and the not so pure. Twain is always highly readable, though sometimes he gets a little carried away with characters and scenarios that don't quite land for us today. I would imagine it's like going to see a four hour lecture from the man itself. If we could do that, there'd be plenty that would be just fine. And we'd think this guy could be talking about 20, 25. And then there's a lot that would be of its time or in the you had to be there category. And in the end, you'd probably rather have the four hours condensed a little bit. We read through some passages in Huck Finn to get to the good stuff. The heart of the book is Huck and Jim on the raft. A slave in search of freedom and a boy in search of understanding. Two Americans and one great American novel. We've got another reclaimed episode for you today. This one is all about Lorraine Hansberry once again. This is an episode that fell out of the archive, but we've cleaned it up and dusted it off and changed some of the musical interludes and now we are presenting it once again. It's too bad that we had to change it. We included an excerpt in a couple of places. We included as background music Nina Simone's song Young, Gifted and Black, which was inspired by Lorraine Hansberry, which is why we included it. Quite something to inspire a song as powerful as that one. And, well, we received a copyright challenge, so we are replacing that music today. So you should check out the song, which is widely available all over the Internet, so you can hear it if you'd like, remind yourself of what that song sounds like. But when you do hear it on the Internet, when you see it, they don't always tell you who inspired the song. And that is something you should know. Her name was Lorraine Hansberry and we'll tell her story after this. This is an ad by BetterHelp. Folks. There's a lot of noise out there and information coming at you all the time, and it's hard to know where to turn. Somehow you've got to find a way to set some boundaries and cope. You want to be the best version of yourself. That's the goal. But how do you know what will work for you? Sometimes when you're overwhelmed, it can help to talk to someone. That's what BetterHelp is for they've served over 5 million people around the world, putting them in touch with over 30,000 therapists at the click of a button. BetterHelp has an App Store rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com literature that's BetterHelp H-E-L-P.com literature hey folks, it's Jack. 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Quince.com literature Jack Daniels is proudly served in fine establishments, questionable joints and everywhere in between. So no matter where you go in every bar, you'll always know someone by name. Jack Jack and Coke shot at Jack Jack Daniels please. Right away. That's what makes Jack Jack please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org Jack Daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks. Copyright 2025 Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume 80 proof. Hello. She was born in 1930 to a real estate broker whose last name became famous thanks to a Supreme Court case challenging racial restrictive covenants. She died just 34 years later of pancreatic cancer. Her name was Lorraine Hansberry and she was eight years old when her father filed his case which demanded equal treatment for black people, arguing that white people should not be allowed to get together and sign agreements preventing black people from buying homes in their neighborhood. When Lorraine was 10. The Supreme Court threw out that case on procedural grounds. But the spirit of activism lived through her. When she was in her late 20s, her play A Raisin in the sun became the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. She was famous now, and she used the rest of her remaining years to continue her fight against injustice. She was also the godmother to Nina Simone's daughter, Lisa. And Nina Simone, the singer you hear in the background, based this famous song on Lorraine Hansberry. And a famous phrase that Lorraine Hansberry delivered in a speech to young, talented black students. There were 16 winners of a creative writing contest. Dying of cancer, Hansberry left her hospital bed to go and see them. I wanted to come to see you, she said, because you are young, gifted and black. Look at the work that awaits you. Write if you will, but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be. The nation needs your gifts. Young, gifted and black, she said. She said she could think of no more dynamic combination. Work hard at it, she said. Care about it. The Lorraine Hansberry story today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Hello, everyone. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for joining me today. I'm glad you're here. Lorraine Hansberry, What a brief life, but so full and rich. Some people get more done in their 20s than the rest of us are able to manage in a lifetime. That's what it is to be young and gifted, I guess. Talent rises to the top. And when talent meets its purpose and finds its artistic expression, its means of artistic expression, great things can happen. And young and gifted and black. Proudly black, using black as a term when it wasn't common to do so. Lorraine Hansberry paved the way for a lot of what came afterwards. Raisin in the sun was produced in 1959 on Broadway. The film. Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. Oh, what a great bear they are. Everyone in that movie is fantastic. Lou Gossett Jr. Is in there, young and skinny. Ruby Dee is an anchor. She's so good. And Sidney Poitier is a Hollywood star, like Brando or Denzel or Jack Nicholson, where there's charisma every second they're on the screen. And yet there's a power that's ready to emerge, to explode. Those guys I mentioned have that quality. De Niro is another one. But especially the young Brando and the young Poitier. They walk like lions. You can't take your eyes off them. They're so graceful and beautiful, even when they're just walking or sitting and listening or drinking a glass of water, whatever they're doing. And then the power comes, the fury and the power. That's a star. Sidney Poitier. He's still alive, by the way. He's 94 years old now. He was the biggest box office star in America in 1967. That movie a Raisin in the sun came out in 1961. One of the key movies that sent him on his way. Lorraine Hansberry at that point had three years left to live, sadly. But even though she died young, we have plenty to talk about with her life. She had a rich life. I'll confess that I'm starting over on this one, which is rare for me. Usually I turn on the mic and talk for about an hour and that's it. Upload the episode, get ready for the next one. No time to dwell. We still haven't, still haven't done Henry James, people. Whenever someone emails or comments and says, well, why haven't you done so and so, I just think, well, sure, yes, he's on our list or she's on our list or that book is on our list. We can't do every author all at once. So gotta please the people. Gotta keep moving. Jack Wilson's a hustler. That's the kind of prize I used to win when I was an athlete in my school days. I was never mvp. I was never all whatever. A lot of honorable mentions, a lot of academic athlete awards, a lot of most improved or team spirit awards, a lot of best hustle. So that's who you get here. Jack Wilson, the hustler. Unlike some of the characters in A Raisin in the sun, as we'll see. We'll get to that later. Anyway, this episode had a false start because I spent almost an hour talking about the restrictive Covenant Court cases as they wound their way through the court system and made their way up to the Supreme Court. There's a fascinating history there which takes us from the Civil War and abolition, well through the Constitution at the beginning, the Founding, even before, takes us on a history of slavery in the United States. But it really takes us on a history from the Civil War and abolition through the 14th Amendment and the passage of that, through the Great Migration, through some very clever lawyering by the NAACP and some Supreme Court rulings and some Supreme Court foot dragging. It's really a great story. But after about 45 minutes of rattling on about that and then saying, let's turn now to Lorraine Hansberry, well, that's not going to do, is it not on the History of Literature podcast, where Go straight at him is our new motto. So let's go straight. Adam let's take a break. We'll come back with Lorraine Hansberry's life. Take another quick break, talk about her masterpiece, A Raisin in the sun, including a little discussion on the universal versus the particular in literature, which became important to the reception of A Raisin in the sun and frustrated Lorraine Hansberry in certain ways. And then we will be all finished, done and dusted, ready for the next one. Never mind the maneuvers, Jack Wilson. Go straight at him. Lorraine Hansberry's life after this. Let's start with her parents. The Hansberrys trace their roots back to the South. Lorraine's mother, Nana Louise Perry, also called Nanny, was born in Tennessee, the daughter of a minister and his wife, Carl Augustus Hansberry. Lorraine's father was born in Mississippi. He and Nana moved to Chicago as part of the great migration, as 6 million former slaves and the children and grandchildren of former slaves moved north to the urban Northeast, finding work in factories and offices and the homes of wealthy white Northerners. Nana, or nanny, taught driving school and worked as a local politician. She was a ward committee woman. Carl was a successful real estate broker and a political activist. Lorraine was the youngest of four children. When she was eight, Carl bought a house on the south side of Chicago in Washington park for the family to move into. Local white residents treated them with hostility, and a homeowners association came by and filed an injunction for them to vacate their home. Their case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court rulings on some procedural grounds. They didn't consider the constitutional question of whether these agreements violated the 14th Amendment, and the Hansberrys had to leave. Carl, frustrated, tried to run for Congress and lost, and the racism in America was getting to him. He planned to move the family to Mexico. He visited there as part of the plan. He had a brain hemorrhage while he was there, and he died young at age 50. Lorraine was 15, so she had grown up in an atmosphere steeped in issues, frustration at injustice and determination to fight and improve society, a determination not to sit by or be quiet or give up. The Hansberry home was visited by prominent black figures like Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, W.E.B. du Bois, Jesse Owens and Langston Hughes. Hang on to that last name in particular. That will return as part of Lorraine's story. Carl's brother was a famous professor who founded the African Civilization section of the history department at Howard University in D.C. lorraine grew up with all this around her. She was a good student and went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and she was ready to fight injustice there, too. This was 1948 when she arrived and the Supreme Court finally ruled that racially restrictive covenants were unconstitutional. Maybe it was the experience of World War II. I'm looking at the difference now between their reluctance to rule this on these grounds in 1940 and their willingness to do it in 1948. What happened? Well, World War II, of course. And maybe it was the experience of World War II with the contributions of black American soldiers who helped to remind or educate white people that black people were Americans too, willing to fight and die for the American flag. Or maybe it was the news from Nazi Germany and the education or reminder of where white supremacy can lead. Or maybe it was the realization, finally, you'd have to be kind of blind not to see it, that there was a central hypocrisy in Supreme Court jurisprudence on this issue. They agreed that the state could not pass a law saying that a black person could not own a particular home. That. That was clearly prohibited by the 14th Amendment. That was a ruling they made decades earlier. States can't do that, can't pass a law that says a black person can't own a home in this particular neighborhood. But for decades, the Supreme Court had said, well, private citizens making agreements on their own to say, we're not going to sell our house to a black person. Well, that's not the state, is it? That's not really prohibited by the Constitution, the 14th Amendment. That's not the. That's individuals. If people want to do that, what can we do about it? They're just people who want their neighborhoods to be a certain way. Like those groups that say you can't put a swimming pool in your front yard or you have to shovel your sidewalk when it snows. There's no state law here. It's not the state preventing it. It's just a private group of people. And we let private citizens do what they want, mostly. So that was the rule for decades. That was why the Hansberrys lost their case. And finally, in 1948, the Supreme Court recognized that even if these are private agreements, and even if the Constitution doesn't prohibit the private agreements from forming, these private agreements are calling on the mechanics and the might of the state to enforce them. They used the state courts to get their injunction. They used the sheriff to go out and effectuate the eviction. That's state action. And states can't do it because of the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court. All white men, of course. For 180 years, the Supreme Court was all male WASPs, with a handful of Catholics here and there. The first Jewish justice was appointed in 1916. The first African American wouldn't come until 1916. 1967. Thurgood Marshall, the first woman, not until 1981. The first Hispanic. 2009. We're still waiting for the first Native American. So when the Supreme Court considered matters of racial justice, they had a particular point of view. In 1948, when they were considering racially restrictive covenants, three of the justices recused themselves because they themselves owned homes with a racially restrictive covenant. They were. That's the struggle, people. So here I go again. I'd better stop now, because I could talk about this for hours. What's interesting for the Lorraine Hansberry story is that she based her play on this central issue. What it's like for a black family to plan to move to a house, a dream house that happens to be in a white neighborhood, only to have that pulled out from under them. By the time she wrote the play, the Supreme Court had declared that unconstitutional. But that didn't mean the issue was over. For one thing, she believed that it had led in part to her father's early death, and he never lived to see the change. And, of course, the issue itself was still alive. White people weren't giving up so easy. They could find ways to make black people not want to live near them. They could still tacitly agree not to sell to a black family. They could still make all the arguments as they do in the play. And we'll get there. The arguments for why this isn't really so bad. This is just a matter of people choosing how they want to live and trying to be like people with whom they have something in common. And isn't that just better? The key is this. Lorraine was not just advocating for a change in a particular policy. She was describing a state of mind. And the state of mind continues before, during, and after a Supreme Court ruling. When she was at Madison as a student attending college, she protested injustice in many forms. And she helped to integrate one of the school dorms, which had been segregated. In 1948, she campaigned for progressive candidate Henry A. Wallace for president. He was an Iowa farmer who had been FDR's vice president, but he lost to Truman. In 1949, she went to Mexico to study painting at the University of Guadalajara. And in 1950, age 20 years old, she went to New York City to become a writer. She lived in Harlem and wrote for a black newspaper. And she was back in the circle with W.E.B. du Bois and Paul Robeson, one of the young, talented people among those prominent figures, those legends. She was in the Communist Party, as were many of her fellow justice seekers. This was the Communist Party that came out of the Depression before the horrors of Stalinism took over. What it meant to be in the Communist Party. She wrote poems about civil rights heroes and famous trials. She wrote articles about colonialism and imperialism. And she focused on the plight of women and the impoverished, as well as the plight of black people. She was also a closeted lesbian, writing about it in her journal, which was not published for decades after her death. She seems to have been moving toward being more open about that side of her. This was not an easy time to be gay, though, to be openly gay. And she was conflicted. I think it's fair to say that we don't know exactly how things would have gone for her because she died so young. But there are signs that her lesbianism made her feel isolated and reasons to believe that had she lived longer, she'd have felt freer to be the person she was. She had lesbian friends and a few lovers toward the end of her life. And she wrote that she was committed to this homosexuality thing. But for most of her life, she was wrestling with this. In 1953, she married a Jewish man, Robert Nemerov. They lived in Greenwich Village. They were both rabble rousers committed to causes of social justice. The night before their wedding, they were out protesting the execution of the Rosenbergs. He was a songwriter, and one of his songs hit it big, Cindy O Cindy, which gave Lorraine some economic freedom. And she immediately put that to good use writing A Raisin in the sun in 1957. That same year, she and Robert separated, and they were divorced in 1962. But they remained close. He was the literary executor of her writings and was the steward and at times, the protector. He kept some of her journals blocked for 50 years, especially the passages about her being a lesbian. But he generally looked after her works for the rest of his life. A Raisin in the sun takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem called Harlem or A Dream Deferred. A Dream Deferred could have been the title of the play, but that's a little too on the nose in any way. A Raisin in the sun is closer to the situation that we see in the play. Here's the whole poem. Harlem by Langston Hughes. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a Raisin in the sun or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? A raisin in the sun. A raisin in the sun here is sort of the example of a dream that gets put off until it's worthless. But there's a question mark as well. It doesn't have to be this way. There are other possibilities for our dream that's deferred. The dream gets postponed in this short poem. It has seven bad outcomes, depending on how you count seven potentially bad outcomes. Deferred dreams are like time bombs in this poem. They can fester, they can dry up, they can run like oozing pus from a wound. They can stink, they can crust, they can sag, and they can explode. This was 1951 when Hughes published this poem. Let's just look at the small dream of wanting to be able to buy a house in any neighborhood you want. That might be a small dream, might sound like a small dream. It's a dream. And it's not so small, actually. Owning a home, deciding where your family will live, feeling the autonomy of working hard to earn money and then putting your money where you want, building your castle. That's not small at all. That's a giant dream. It's the biggest dream most of us get. As big as an artist wanting to be an artist, or a high school student wanting to go to college, or a factory worker wanting to be an entrepreneur. For a real estate salesman like Lorraine's father, it's his stock in trade, buying property, even if there are white neighbors. Well, if it's the neighborhood you want to live in, why not? And the supreme court in the 1920s said, maybe someday, but not now. In 1940, they said it again directly to Carl Hansberry, maybe someday, but not now. And then he died. His dream had been deferred, not because he deferred it or chose to defer it, but because the rest of the world had forced him to wait. You can imagine Lorraine Hansberry reading this poem by Langston Hughes. Was about the same age as her father, a few years older, no, a few years younger, reading this poem in 1951 and thinking, yes, that was my father. A dream deferred. It did all this to him. It festered, it oozed, it dried up. It was a heavy burden. His dream deferred and it exploded. He died of a brain hemorrhage in his brain. We don't know for sure what caused it. We never can. But we know what weighed heaviest on him and his mind. It was racism in America. So bad and so frustrating that first he left the south for the north, and so bad and so frustrating in the north that he was looking to move to Mexico. In 1957, she was writing her play that had this at its. What happens to a man with a dream, a whole family with a dream, when those dreams are pulled away or undermined or postponed? And she wrote to Langston Hughes the most beautiful letter. She wanted his okay to use his poem. Dear Mr. Hughes, she wrote, I am the author of a three act dramatic play on Negro family life. I have tentatively chosen as a title for this work a line from one of your poems. The line is A Raisin in the Sun. I should be extremely gratified and complimented to receive your consent for the use of this line as a title. Hughes replied almost two months later. Kind of a long time to wait. Since she was writing from Greenwich Village and he was living in Harlem, the letters didn't have to travel too far. He wrote, Dear Mrs. Nemeroff. That was her stationery, although she had signed her name Lorraine Hansberry with Nemeroff in parentheses. Dear Mrs. Nemeroff, I can't recall whether I answered your letter of February 8th requesting permission to use the line A Raisin in the sun as a title for your three act play. Then there's an asterisk there. He writes, I am happy to give my permission for its use and send you all my good wishes for its success. Sincerely yours, Langston Hughes. That's the part that's typed, as her letter to him had been. And then in a handwritten note, he follows his handwritten asterisk, which is just an X, and he writes at the bottom of the page, I was in the hospital when your note arrived. And then everything got piled up apologizing. He was there for opening night of the Broadway performance in 1959. The play was a smash hit, winning prizes, huge audiences, a Hollywood film. There was one more bit of correspondence between them worth mentioning. Lorraine Hansberry Nemeroff writes to Langston Hughes. Dear, dear Langston, like a whole generation of people, you have been my favorite living poet. You are swiftly becoming one of my favorite people. Your thoughtfulness across country in sending me clips about the play has really been marvelous. And now your sweet note. Why don't we get together more often? We would love to have you to dinner soon. Not greens. I will honor your warning on that tradition. But drinks and steak and conversation. Did I ever tell you what a moving thing it was that you should have been the last person to see Richard Wright? Something so dramatic about it because of what the two of you have been to Negro letters. There are also so many things I would like to ask about. The younger generation of Negro writers must learn to honor the mentors among our writers and argue too. Warmest regards, Lorraine. To honor and to argue. Hughes was born in 1902. He was about 28 years older than Lorraine. Lorraine was ready to take her place among the next generation of writers, but of course it was not to be or not to be for long. He might have been older, but he outlived her. If he had handed her the torch to carry, and if she ran with it for a while, it was soon one that she had to hand back. Take a quick break, then come back with our look at what we do have from that period where she was carrying the torch. One of the great plays of the 20th century in America, A Raisin in the Sun Prime Delivery is fast. How fast are we talking? We're talking puzzle toys and lit pad delivered so fast you can get this puppy under control fast. We're talking chew toys at your door without really waiting. Fast. Pads, cooling mat and petcime are fast and fast. And there's training T R E A T s faster than you can say sit fast. And now we can all relax and order these matching hoodies to get cozy and cute. Fast, fast. Free delivery. It's on prime this episode is brought to you by Greenlight. Get this Adults with financial literacy skills have 82% more wealth than those who don't. From swimming lessons to piano classes, us parents invest in so many things to enrich our kids lives, but are we investing in their future financial success? With Greenlight, you can teach your kids financial literacy skills like earning, saving and investing. And this investment costs less than that. After school treat start prioritizing their financial education and future today with a risk free trial@greenlight.com Spotify greenlight.com Spotify Raisin in the sun was written in 1957 and debuted on Broadway in 1959. It was an unusual play for its time. A black cat cast with only one white character who plays a kind of Hannah Arendtian figure of the banality of evil. Although this play was made a few years before Hannah Arendt coined that phrase, the nearly all black cast made the investment risky and it took over a year for the producer to raise the money to bring it to Broadway. And then it was a Smash, with audiences enthralled by the drama and by Sidney Poitiers electric performance. It played for 530 shows, with the great Ossie Davis taking over for Poitier partway through the run. By 1983, Frank Rich could write in the New York Times that A Raisin in the sun changed American theater forever. I'm going to base my interpretation of it on the film, which came out a couple of years later, mostly starring the original cast. Hansberry herself wrote the screenplay. It's set in a Chicago apartment where the younger family, a black family of course, are living in cramped conditions. All the characters have a dream, you might say, although our focus is primarily on Walter, who's dreaming the hardest. But he's not the only one. Dreams are in conflict and dreams are within reach. Walter's father has died and his mother, the family matriarch, Lena, is about to receive a check from the insurance company for $10,000. You know the line about how there are only two real stories. One is a stranger comes to town and the other is a man goes on a journey. Well, in a way, the check is like the stranger coming to town. Here's a family that has lived in poverty for generations and suddenly there is extra money. And maybe that means some kind of escape is possible. It's going to change the way things are for these people. There are some dreams that can perhaps be realized, but what? Which dream? How should the money be used? That's the question for the grandmother. And here's what she's faced with. Let's put you in her shoes. You've worked hard for years starting out in the south, living in the era when slavery has transitioned to its harsh aftermath. And you and your husband have always dreamed of owning a house. You have two kids now. They've grown. Your husband dies, leaving you some money. You move in with your children. The brother and sister live together and so does the brother's wife and son. There isn't a lot of room for. What is that? The five of you and your daughter in law is about to learn that she's pregnant again. It seems like some space would be good. Why not a house? So there's one potential use for the $10,000. A down payment on some nice little house where you can garden and your grandson, and soon your new grandchild can play in the backyard and have a room that's not just a bed in the living room. Here's another good use for the money, surely. Your daughter is attending medical school. She wants to be a doctor. She's a little artistic, a little creative. She's maybe not the best student. Sometimes she skips class. She doesn't always stick to what she starts. She's the kind of person who buys musical instruments and goes all out. And then they sit in her closet while she moves on to the next thing. Boy, do I know how that is. My closet has a bass guitar and fly fishing equipment and golf clubs and all these things I haven't touched for years. Sometimes you just need to get the gear. Anyway, this daughter is still in school. She's meeting some interesting people there. Like a friend she meets from Africa, which puts her in a bit of an African phase, which is fascinating to you. The grandmother, the mother. You're an American. It's all you've ever known. But of course you're interested in how Africans live, too. And although you don't know a whole lot about it, you have respect for her friend and who he is and where he's from. So now we're up to two very good uses for the money. A house for the family that needs more room and education. Tuition payments for the daughter who wants to put the family on a whole new path. Professionals. Instead of chauffeurs and piecemeal laundry work and other services to white people in their homes. Your husband worked very hard. You both did. And you feel very loyal to his memory in figuring out how best to spend this money that came from his death. He worked all of his life and died, literally died, so that you could have this money. But there's a third piece, a third potential dream. Your son Walter has one. He's your husband's son, too. He's followed in his father's footsteps as best he could. He works as a chauffeur as well, but he is not happy about it. Not that your husband was happy about work, but he put his head down, put his shoulder into it. He was working to make life better for the family. Walter is doing the same, but he has a harder time. He has a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. He doesn't want to work for another person. He wants to be his own boss. He spends his nights at the bar with some friends who have the same ideas. How do you become your own boss? How do you live in America if you aren't your own boss? You work hard, yes, but to be your own boss, you have to take some risks. You assert yourself as someone who's got bigger things in mind, who's not going to settle for being that chauffeur. You Dare to dream. But it's the riskiest of the three uses of the money. Or at least it looks that way to Lena, the grandmother. And the idea that Walter has for a business opening a liquor store does not seem like the greatest use of. Of money to her. Not the greatest investment. Her husband would not be a fan of a plan to open a liquor store. It's risky. And what does that do to the community? It's not exactly a churchly kind of business. On the other hand, it's killing Walter to be dressing up in a chauffeur's outfit and answering to the boss. He's drying up like a raisin in the sun. And he's festering and he's sagging with heaviness. And sometimes he explodes. And now there's money with opportunity. He's ready. What did his father work all his life for if not to see his son taking a risk, but then living with the kind of freedom and joy that being a boss can bring? How many generations have to stifle their dreams before one can be expressed? I won't spoil the rest of the play or the movie except to say that all three dreams are not exactly what they appear to be. At first, none of them are safe bets. And in the course of a couple of hours, we watch as the fortunes of this family rise and fall, sometimes because of the way the deck is stacked against black people in particular, and sometimes because of individual failings or circumstance. The play is about trust and optimism and family unity in the face of adversity and determination. It's a beautiful play. It's absolutely riveting. And it's worth watching the film for Sidney Poitier alone. So there was kind of a controversy that came out as critics tried to wrestle with this play and what it meant for American literature and Broadway, and they tripped all over themselves trying to describe whether the play was universal or particular. And they made such a hash out of it that I thought I'd offer some thoughts on this. What do we mean by universal and particular? We say it all the time. What do we mean by that? All works of art have this to some degree. And great works of art are usually a blend of the two, and they get credited as such. When we read about a king in Shakespeare, let's say it's King Lear. We're reading about what it's like to be a king. There's a particular situation here that most of us don't share. He's an extremely powerful person who is dividing his kingdom. That's not something I myself have ever done with an actual kingdom or will do. I've never been a king, never been waited on by courtiers. I've never worn a crown. I've never been in the position of dividing my kingdom. I don't talk like him. I don't wear clothes like him. I'm not carried around on a pillow, not that he is, but you know what I mean. I don't know exactly what it's like to be that person inside those clothes, inside that skin. And yet I can share in the experience. Because in King Lear, we're also invited to share what it's like to be a father, to wonder if your children truly love you or merely want your money. I haven't worried about that, but I've been on the other side of that with some extended relatives who were concerned about their inheritance and who it was going to and what it meant and who was. Who deserved it and who was loyal. And we're invited to be in a world in King Lear where you love your children but maybe don't trust them. In a world where you're aging and can no longer trust your own grip on reality. Or a world where you have some power but give it up and maybe wish you hadn't given it up too soon. A world where you have to figure out what to do with your wealth after you're gone, and so on. These are experiences that we see, no matter who we are. We see in our grandparents and parents and eventually feel ourselves. That's universal. Parental love, filial love, loyalty, betrayal, anger, resentment, fear. Those are universal ideas, shared emotions. The particular comes with these characters at this time, these specific circumstances. Their situation is specific to them. The details matter. You can't say, I know exactly how this character feels, or I know exactly what that's like, or I went through the exact same thing. Unless you yourself really are close to that person in age demographics, sibling order, marital status, and so on. Sometimes there's a movie about Woodstock, let's say, and someone says, oh, yeah, that's what it's like. They captured it. We're Vietnam. Yes, yes, I was there. That resonates with me. That's my experience. But the point is, universal in particular are not strictly binary. They're not opposite poles. They're sort of on a sliding scale, depending on the level of abstraction that you view these things with. I might identify with a character who lives in London, let's say. But that might be because I've lived in a city and something about being in an urban space strikes a chord with me. You don't have to have the exact same experience to identify with living in a city. Someone else might say, no, no, you're wrong about that. Yes, there's a little about living in a city in general. I get that you identify with that. But living in London is different. It's not like other cities. So what resonated with you was the universal aspects of it. But that doesn't mean you got everything in the play. A Londoner might feel something even more specific, the same thing. A play set in London can be both universal and particular, depending on the level of abstraction. And that's fair. The problem is we don't usually make a big deal about this when we go to see a play. We're not surprised. It's not worthy of comment. And what seems to have happened when this play came out in 1959 was that a lot of critics, meaning a lot of white critics, went into the play thinking, ah, yes, we know what we're getting here. We're going to see a particular situation. We will learn something about these people or these issues. Almost as if the critics were going to a sermon or a lecture or a National Geographic film. They thought, black caste, black authority. It's about black people in Chicago. Okay, this sounds like we'll be learning a lot about this culture. Look at this. This is how they live. And this will be about a law that needs to change, a situation that can no longer be tolerated. This will be a social drama, as they were called, a protest play. Characters. This is the assumption. Characters will be cardboard. They'll deliver arguments. We'll sit and listen and agree or disagree, depending on our politics. And we'll go and write up our review and say, this play is about a law that needs to change. And instead, what happened was the critics found themselves caught up in the story, identifying with the characters. That's the universality part. They said, wait a minute. My parents worked hard for me and they worried about how I'd turn out. They had dreams for me too, but they were wise enough to have some fear when it looked like I was headed for trouble. Wow, that woman reminds me of my mother or my grandmother felt like that about her husband, loyal to him like that. And she demanded that everyone fear God in her house and so on. Or that sister is like my sister on her way to medical school. But also, maybe that's not the right fit for her. Or the family struggling to make ends meet. Reminds me of when I was worried about paying the bills and so on. And so in their reviews, they wrote about their experience watching the play and they tried to capture that aspect of the play. Now, what's wrong with that? It's a good thing that they recognize themselves in the play and identify with the characters and that they credit the play for doing that. Here's what's the problem with them. The reviews can be hard to read. Some of them because. Not because praising the play for having universal themes is an insult to the play or even wrong, but because of the assumption that can underlie that praise. It's a little bit like a white person calling a black person articulate. And we cringe and we frown at the white person because we know that that's an insult. And the white person says, well, what's wrong with saying that the black person is articulate? Isn't that a positive thing? I wasn't trying to insult anyone. I was trying to pay a compliment. My goodness, what's better than to call someone articulate? Speech is important. Good speech is hard to do. It's like a gift. It's important in our society and so on, right? You've heard this. I wish someone would call me articulate. I wouldn't complain about it. What's wrong, of course, is what's underlying that compliment. It seems to be expressing some surprise, as if the mouth opened, the words came out, and you were surprised. What does that say about black people that you were surprised? I'm not going to dwell on this because you know all this already. That's not the point here. We're talking about 1959, when the critics went to see A Raisin in the sun and they wrote reviews and said, whoa, this play is universal. Sidney Boitier plays a struggling young man who happens to be black. One commentator writing later said, it's astonishing how often the phrase happens to be black gets used. Now hold that thought for a moment. It's going to be very important later to the Lorraine Hansberry story. There are problems with this collapse of the universal and the particular. There are problems we've hopefully moved beyond now. But my guess is there are still reviews and reviewers that get this wrong, whether it's about black people or about gay people or whatever category disabled. I'm spending time with it because it was important to how A Raisin in the sun was perceived in its day and because Hansberry herself wrestled with these ideas coming from the critics. Sometimes she laughed about it, but the laughter was not exactly carefree. Almost everything I described above. When I summarized the play and put you in the shoes of the grandmother is universal at some level of abstraction. I know plenty of poor people of all backgrounds who don't have enough space and can't afford a bigger house. There have been people who said, you know, this is particular, but it's particular to any minority group. That's not exactly right, but I know what they're trying to say. We all know people who are poor. It doesn't matter who you are. You want a bigger house. You wish you didn't have a boss, but who don't have enough money to start a business. That's common, too. Or families who have another kid on the way just when it seems like another mouth to feed is going to be a backbreaker. Or people who go to school but maybe wish there was a little more room for creative expression in school, who struggle with that. These are universal themes. Families who care about each other but fight. Siblings and parents who struggle with money and inheritance and guilt and accusations. It's universal. It's very universal. You could probably adapt this play and set it in ancient Athens or Tang Dynasty China or Nome, Alaska, or wherever. But then there's the particular. If you treat the play as if it could belong to anyone, as if it's not specific to its time and place and people, you would miss some essential elements of the black experience in its time. The way the grandmother was so close to slavery and she and her husband had worked their way up from dire circumstances. The way that shaped her. The way that that experience shaped her. Thinking about hard work and getting by and God and family. The way the migration to the north took away one way of life and put a family in a Chicago apartment with different kinds of jobs, different opportunities and different challenges, and the need to adapt. The way that working as a chauffeur for a white man, not just be a guy who'd rather not have a boss, but a black man looking for pride and self esteem and fighting every day in a system that refuses to allow him even a small measure of it. The way the black American student is fascinated by Africa and the way the African is fascinated by African Americans in return. And the way the two of them think, what if we reunite after 300 years of cultural separation? Is that possible? Is it desirable? Would it work? What would it mean for us? How would we grow? And of course, the way that even a dream within reach can become a dream deferred. And how a raisin in the sun can slowly dry up. But sometimes the dream deferred can also explode. That's universal. In one way, but another way. It's not universal. It's not the same for everyone in America when the world is pitted against you. Society, the courts, the public, the money, politicians, the police, everyone. You can work all your life and see things jerked away because of a Supreme Court ruling. And to almost feel like that jerking away of your dream is an inevitability so predetermined that it's something you need to consider and plan for and plan against, and somehow not let it defeat you, even though the most optimistic person should probably realistically count on that getting you in the end. That's particular. To wash that away or to wish it away is to lose something essential to Lorraine Hansberry's play. There's an incident that happened afterward that shed some light on this. Hansberry was interviewed for the New York Times and the interviewer misquoted her. And the quote got modified multiple times until it became something that completely blurred this line between the universal and the particular. And it threatened to erase these essential qualities and aspects that I talked about just now. She was quoted in the New York Times as saying, I told them this wasn't a Negro play. It was a play about, honest to God, believable, many sided people who happened to be Negroes. Hansberry clipped this article out, put it into her scrapbook and wrote, never said no such thing, with the no all caps and underlined. Ms. Robertson goofed. Ms. Robertson was the interviewer. Ms. Robertson goofed. Letter sent post haste. Tune in next week. Hansberry wrote, but the Times never printed the correction. A month later the quote was repeated in the New York Times. And then the quote spread everywhere. It was used by critics and essayists all over, and it was shortened and it was modified. Now it was about Hansberry herself. The quote became, I'm not a Negro writer, but a writer who happens to be a Negro. It's not something. She said, well, what's wrong with that? I'm not a Negro writer, but a writer who happens to be a Negro. What's wrong with that? Isn't that like saying that Chekhov isn't a Russian writer, but a writer who happens to be Russian? Don't we want to drop the labels and give writers credit for being bigger than any particular group? Just give them credit for being a writer? I think the answer to that is yes, but. Yes, but. Well, first of all, we don't want anyone to be misquoted if they didn't say something. We don't want that to be something that's attributed to them. But getting Back to the point. I think the answer is yes, but yes, but we want to celebrate the universality of A Raisin in the sun because it's a great work of art that anyone, anywhere can believe in and find meaning in. But if you push that too hard, you only ask white people to make one concession. Black people are human beings too. They're just like everyone else. And white people make that concession and say, great, I just watched a play, I was moved, I cried, I felt the pain of the struggle, I rejoiced, I admired the acting, I admired the writing. And you know, that could have been about white people. And Lorraine Hansberry said, yes, but yes, but yes, it's true. Black people are human beings too. They're many sided. That's why this is something that is beyond just a protest drama. It's more than that. There is universality here. Describing a family you can find your own family in. Yes, but the but here is don't stop there, don't sanitize this. Recognize the humanity and say that it's there. But don't ignore that there is a difference. It isn't the same. The struggles and the success are not the same. You can't say that it could have been about white people. It would not be the same if it was because the context for the struggles and the success or the potential success are not the same. Lorraine Hansberry didn't live long and after she became a celebrity and famous for this play, she met with Bobby Kennedy and she wrote essays and articles and lectured and advocated. She wrote some more plays, but nothing had the same same success as this one. Her autobiography was published posthumously and her former husband, Robert Nemerov turned those writings into a play that was successful. But for literature, she truly made her mark with a raisin in the sun. She's one of literature's comets streak through the sky and die young. That's the play that reminds us of how a set of universal themes, when blended with the particular, can become a great work of art. And how even when themes are universal, being black can give them a kind of additive or accelerant, a plus feature. That's how it works in America. You root for underdogs. Well, let me show you some. You fight injustice. Wait until you see this. You think poverty grinds you down. Well, this is poverty plus. And if there's optimism, it's hard won't. It's brighter for the struggle. If there's perseverance, it's deeper and more impressive because the hardships are greater. If there's anger. It has a deeper well to draw from. And if there's injustice, it's more widespread, it's more frustrating, it's historical in context, and it's got more all encompassing aspects to it. Centuries of history have gone into this injustice. Institutions have been molded around it. To triumph in the face of that is a more emotional triumph too. Reaching the peaks are a greater accomplishment because the climb is longer and more arduous. And there's more that goes into it, something that shouldn't be lost or overlooked. That's something particular. And there's also the particularity that the triumphs might not be such triumphs. The struggle might be different, but so too might the success. It's all important to take in when we watch a play like this, just like it's important to keep it in mind as we live our lives. Whether we're here or there, black or white or whoever we are, keep it all in mind. Embrace the emotion, but at the same time treat the experience with the intellectual complexity that it deserves. Remember that to be young and gifted might be universal. To be young and gifted and black is particular. Okay, there we go. This is Jack in 2025. My thanks to Rick the Listener for his wonderful email and of course to you, dear Listener. Make sure you check out our newsletter. You can sign up for that@historyofliterature.com you can read the musings of Emma, the show's producer who is the most private person in the world. She is not on any social media, but she writes an Emma's Note each month and they are my favorite part of the newsletter. And also we have some Q&As with the guests and some notes about upcoming shows and so on. And of course it is available totally free for you. We're going to take Thursday off as we get ready for some fall planning, but we'll be back in September with a lot of brand new content to the revolutionary aspects of John Milton and Dostoyevsky is coming up soon and lots more. Don't forget to check out our History of Literature Podcast tour, which you can learn more about@historyofliterature.com we're going to Literary England and I can't wait. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Behind every great meal is a person with a story to tell. Hear them on Culinary Characters Unlocked, the podcast that reveals the lives behind the food. Hosted by me, David Page, Emmy Award winning journalist and creator of Diners Drive Ins and Dives as I talk with everyone from from culinary legends to mom and pop standouts about the creativity, grit and passion that shape the food we love. Follow culinary characters unlocked on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind every empire are the people History Tried to forget. Lost Roman Heroes tells the stories of the remarkable characters who shaped Rome from its mythical beginnings to its final fault. Each episode blends armchair storytelling, sharp historical insight, and a bit of humor to bring these lost figures to life. From generals to scientists, from rebels to empresses, from priests to politicians, these lost Roman heroes have one thing in common. 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