'A raisin in the sun'

Read the short, powerful poem that inspired the title of a landmark American play

Nov 29, 2024

Langston Hughes, ‘Harlem’

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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?

About the author

Langston Hughes (1901-67) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, and civil rights activist who was a leading member of the Harlem Renaissance.

To read alongside...

Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first play by a Black woman playwright to be performed on Broadway and the first to be directed by a Black director (Lloyd Richards). It was remarkable too for its almost exclusively Black cast (there is only one white character). Drawing on her own harrowing experiences of growing up in Chicago during segregation, Hansberry brought Black domestic life to the stage and depicted the everyday struggles of a family trying to survive in an unequal society.

Hansberry quotes Hughes’s poem as the epigraph to her play as well as borrowing the potent ‘raisin in the sun’ phrase for its title, signalling how the characters in the play each have dreams of a better future. The drama centres on their determination to move to a better neighborhood, and the ensuing attempts by the white neighborhood association to rebuff them. Will their dreams be deferred and wither like raisins in the sun?

A scene from Lorraine Hansberry’s play *A Raisin in the Sun* (Public Domain)

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