Looking for Lorraine
The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
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Narrated by:
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LisaGay Hamilton
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By:
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Imani Perry
About this listen
Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction
Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award
A New York Times Notable Book of 2018
A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” and Imani Perry’s multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.
After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation’s first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry’s extraordinary life—a life that was tragically cut far too short.
A Black Caucus of the American Library Association Honor Book for Nonfiction
A 2019 Pauli Murray Book Prize Finalist
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Critic reviews
“The steady cadence of Hamilton’s voice creates a mellow, informative, and poised narration of her story. Hamilton is not only informing the listener but also teaching and, most of all, sharing the uncommon details that shaped this energetic woman.... This audiobook is like watching a documentary of someone paving the way for future artist-activists.” (AudioFile Magazine)
“Perry seeks to deepen our appreciation in this richly dimensional portrait of a brightly blazing artist, thinker, and activist.... Perry does not dwell on the minutiae of traditional biographical coverage of what, when, and where, focusing, instead, on who and why, on inner drama rather than exterior events. Mining writings private and published, collecting memories, tracking the reverberations of Hansberry’s personality, words, and actions, and, at times, entering the narrative, Perry illuminates with arresting impact Hansberry’s thoughts, feelings, and revolutionary social consciousness.... Perry’s ardent, expert, and redefining work of biographical discovery brings light, warmth, scope, and enlightening complexity to the spine-straightening story of a brilliant, courageous, seminal, and essential American writer.” (Booklist, starred review)
“Its strongest chapters - on A Raisin in the Sun and Lorraine’s coming into her own as a public intellectual - are masterly syntheses of research and analysis. It’s a joy for devotees to encounter some record of Hansberry’s influences, including the Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey and the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.... Perry makes a welcome case for a fresh assessment of Hansberry’s nondramatic works: her short stories, many published pseudonymously in lesbian magazines, and her many letters and op-eds on politics and literature for The Village Voice and The New York Times.” (The New York Times Book Review)
"An intimate portrait of the artist as a black woman at the crossroads.... Perry infuses the narrative with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm because she believes Hansberry has something to teach us in these ‘complicated times’. Impressively, she tells her subject’s story in a tightly packed 200 pages. Perry also smartly delves into the inspirations for Hansberry’s brilliant A Raisin in the Sun and engagingly explores Hansberry’s profound friendships with James Baldwin and Nina Simone.... Throughout this animated and inspiring biography, Perry reminds us that the ‘battles Lorraine fought are still before us: exploitation of the poor, racism, neocolonialism, homophobia, and patriarchy.’” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
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Butterfly in the Typewriter
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The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
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Worth it! Good biography. Informative.
- By French Quarter on 07-09-13
By: Cory MacLauchlin
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Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness
- What It Means to Be Black Now
- By: Touré, Michael Eric Dyson
- Narrated by: Touré
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- Unabridged
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A provocative look at what it means to be Black today. This audiobook includes excerpts from over 100 interviews with Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Skip Gates, Melissa Harris-Perry, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon, Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Mooney, NY Gov. David Paterson, Harold Ford, Jr., Soledad O'Brien, Kamala Harris, Chuck D, Questlove, and others.
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Food for Thought
- By Sara on 12-22-11
By: Touré, and others
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Manifesto
- On Never Giving Up
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- Narrated by: Bernardine Evaristo
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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From the best-selling and Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism.
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Glorious performance and inspiring story
- By Maggi Morehouse on 01-25-22
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
- By: Gerald Martin
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.
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Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.
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By: Gerald Martin
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Becoming Faulkner
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- By: Philip Weinstein
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William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional challenges: his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism.
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Miss.'s BCS-Bundren.Compson.Snopes/Sutpen/Sartoris
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What Truth Sounds Like
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This audiobook exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape.
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Riffing on a meeting with RFK and James Baldwin
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Witness
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- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
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Ariel Burger first met Elie Wiesel at age 15. They studied together and taught together. Witness chronicles the intimate conversations between these two men over decades as Burger sought counsel on matters of intellect, spirituality, and faith while navigating his own personal journey from boyhood to manhood, from student and assistant to rabbi and, in time, teacher. In this profoundly hopeful, thought-provoking, and inspiring audiobook, Burger takes us into Elie Wiesel's classroom, where the art of listening and storytelling conspire to keep memory alive.
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Touching and enlightening
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By: Ariel Burger
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Ayn Rand and the World She Made
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- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
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Ayn Rand is the author of two phenomenally best-selling ideological novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which have sold over 12 million copies in the United States alone. Through them, she built a right-wing cult following in the late 1950s and became the guiding light of Libertarianism and of White House economic policy in the 1960s and '70s. Her defenses of radical individualism and of selfishness as a "capitalist virtue" have permanently altered the American cultural landscape.
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Great history of both Rand and her era
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By: Anne C. Heller
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Covering
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Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights.
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Humane Advocacy in Law and Life
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By: Kenji Yoshino
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Frederick Douglass
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As a young man, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. He wrote three versions of his autobiography over the course of his lifetime and published his own newspaper. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence, he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.
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The sound of rollerskating in sand
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Notes of a Native Son
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Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.
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Masterful Essayist
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National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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Delusion shattering
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Existentialism and Excess
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Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the undisputed giants of 20th-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism, combined with his creative and artistic flair, have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high-profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion.
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a capitalista biography of Sartre
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Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody
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In this powerful and passionate memoir - his final work - Cone describes the obstacles he overcame to find his voice, to respond to the signs of the times, and to offer a voice for those - like the parents who raised him in Bearden, Arkansas, in the era of lynching and Jim Crow - who had no voice. Recounting lessons learned both from critics and students, and the ongoing challenge of his models King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, he describes his efforts to use theology as a tool in the struggle against oppression and for a better world.
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You need to understand Cone to get his Theology
- By Adam Shields on 02-11-20
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Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching
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How do you learn to be a Black man in America? For young Black men today, it means coming of age during the presidency of Barack Obama. It means witnessing the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, and too many more. It means celebrating powerful moments of Black self-determination for LeBron James, Dave Chappelle, and Frank Ocean. In Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith chronicles his own personal and political education during these tumultuous years.
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History through a Young Black Man's Eyes!! Perfect
- By Patricia Hambsch on 08-31-16
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Empire of Self
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The product of 30 years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well - a virtual who's who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood.
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Well done!
- By Christopher on 03-22-16
By: Jay Parini
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What listeners say about Looking for Lorraine
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Cynthia Heard
- 04-11-22
Happy to have found this
I appreciate that Imani Perry was curious enough about Lorraines life to study her story and provide it to the rest of us who are looking for connection to our past. My ancestors didn't speak much of the racism and slights they encountered in the MS delta. I am grateful.
The narrator is okay. Her voice has lilt that makes it go under and down as if wind was coming out of a sail.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Water79
- 02-07-23
Extraordinary book and exquisitely narrated
I will never forget this book. I loved Lorraine Hansberry ever since I was a child dreaming of becoming a writer. This book gave me so much more to love. What an incredible human, artist, and activist she was. This book touched me in such a real way, I had such deep grief in the chapter about her illness and passing, becoming among the mourners of someone I have known to be deceased as long as I’ve known her name. Imani Perry renders her with such aliveness and love that I was taken fully through her life and brought to that grief and then also the inspiration to pick up my pen and write in honor of Ancestor Hansberry. This was a pleasure to read and learn from. I’ll be thinking about this book for quite some time.
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1 person found this helpful
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- marie
- 12-26-23
The Depth of Lorraine
Wow…who knew? What a woman and story of a life. Thank you, Ms. Perry!
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- lola crump
- 01-25-23
A must read
Do your ears a favor and challenge your thinking. Listen intently to this book you will be glad that you did! I know I am. I learned and I am grateful for the author but more so for the life of Lorraine.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Proppasaurus Rex
- 06-26-22
Exquisite!
A lovely, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a stunning & courageous human being, ahead of her time. Lorraine was a worthy member of radical royalty.
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1 person found this helpful
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- mikaya strickling
- 11-23-19
Beyond The Raisin
This book goes far beyond Lorraine Hansberry as just the first black female playwright on Broadway, but goes deeper into who she was, who she wasn’t and what she stood for.
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5 people found this helpful
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- P. Hart
- 10-05-21
Incredible story about an extraordinary person
Imani Perry’s writing brings to the thinking and feeling life of Lorraine Hansberry. Her striving for justice and witness to life through her art is an inspiring story. The reader’s voice is much too muffled. She drops the end of most of the sentences and runs words together. Audible probably could have done better with the engineering to make the normal inflection and level of her voice easier to hear.
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2 people found this helpful
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- CBC B.
- 05-14-23
Wow great read!
My mind was opened to who Lorraine Hansberry really was. She was a powerhouse and helped to move this country forward!
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- Rose Brookins
- 03-20-19
Radiant
This book, like its subject, was radiant. The story of Lorraine’s life is peopled with familiar names — Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Nina Simone, etc — but even though I’d heard of ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ I didn’t know anything about it or about Lorraine Hansberry. I did not expect to be so gripped by the life of a woman I’d barely heard of. I haven’t read a lot of biographies so I don’t know how common it is to find one that reads like a love letter to its subject. Imani Perry’s language in speaking of Lorraine seems to sing with love for her, and LisaGay Hamilton’s reading of those words is lovely. This single book probably teaches black history of this time period as well as any school course in the country.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Robin Groothuis
- 08-09-23
I thought I knew
Wow! What a remarkable woman. Imani Perry puts her life into a recognizable frame, not a person who is unreachable but one who was alive in every way like the rest of us. I loved this book.
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