Post- world War II, Victorian Female, and Romantic Period Female Literature Comparison of Language

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965)

Chicago playwright Lorraine Hansberry became the first Black female playwright to have a play produced on Broadway with her 1959 work A Raisin in the Sun, the story of a Black South Chicagoan family and its struggle against racist housing policies. The title of the play draws its name from a line in the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes. The play was a smashing success, nominated for four Tony Awards and drawing large Black audiences to the theater. The heartbreaking verisimilitude to Hansberry’s own life is witnessed in a lawsuit her family brought regarding racially motivated housing segregations. 
Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer in 1965 at the age of 34 but left a writing legacy behind: Hansberry was the first Black dramatist, fifth woman, and youngest playwright to win a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Before her playwright career, Hansberry published poetry and was a journalist and activist.

Arundhati Roy (1961–)

Arundhati Roy is best known for her 1997 runaway hit The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and made her the bestselling non-expatriate Indian writer. Though Roy penned a work of fiction, she drew from her childhood experiences in Aymanam in Kerala, India. Focusing on the lives of fraternal twins, the story details how “small things” affect human existence. 
Roy started her career as a screenwriter for television and film, and later wrote the television serial “The Banyan Tree.” In 2019, her ardent political advocacy found an outlet in her book of essays, My Seditious Heart. Roy has critiqued American capitalism and its war in Afghanistan, as well as supported Kasmiri separatism. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, was published in June 2017 and chosen for the Man Booker Prize 2017 longlist and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Maxine Hong Kingston (1940–)

Maxine Hong Kingston is an illustrious foremother of Asian American literature. Kingston’s literary strength lies in her genre-defying mashups of fiction and nonfiction, folktales, and autobiography, which resonate as both earthly and magical.
She’s esteemed for her memoir The Woman Warrior, which intertwines her autobiography with Chinese folk tales. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Woman Warrior tells stories of Kingston’s life—many of which involving her mother—by employing folk plots and other storytelling elements. 
Influenced by Walt Whitman, she wrote poetry as well as the novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, a tale of Wittman Ah Sing, a Berkeley grad living in San Francisco during the Beat period. In 1980, she published China Men, a sequel to The Woman Warrior, which details the settlement of the Kingston men in America and blends elements of truth and fiction. The book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction the next year.