Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays: The Drinking Gourd/What Use Are Flowers?

Lorraine Hansberry is best remembered for "Raisin in the Sun" which, even today, many feel is a strong statement against racism. However, "Raisin" pales in comparison to "Les Blancs", a much more militant and radical statement which, I have not doubt, must have genuinely frightened the liberal establishment in the 1960's. This play was decades ahead of it's time and it is no wonder that the more comfortable "Raisin" is what Ms Hansberry is mostly remembered for. Anyone who knows both of these works will realize that the world lost a great treasure when cancer stole this brilliant African-American lesbian's life from us when she was just 34. (Although Ms. Hansberry, married a white Jewish man, Robert Nemiroff in 1953, the couple separated in 1957 and divorced in 1964. She wrote some articles for "The Ladder", the first lesbian periodical in the United States, in the late 1950's.)