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A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
This celebrated play debuted in 1959 and has had many stage productions, been adapted as a movie, and received many awards. Set later than “Marigolds,” in the 1950s, the play develops topics central to and suggested in the story: the struggle for Black Americans to escape poverty and find the American Dream that, for Lizabeth, seems out of reach, the stress on Black fathers to provide well in a society that exploits them, and the communities that arise among Black people to support each other. The connection between Hansberry’s play and Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem,” in which the famous line “What happens to a dream deferred?” occurs, provides further context for the Black experience in the period that is the setting of “Marigolds.”
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Lee’s now-beloved novel, set in a fictional southern town in the early years of Great Depression, shares the retrospective structure of “Marigolds” and deals with issues of race, discrimination, and poverty. Like Lizabeth, Scout, the novel’s narrator, experiences a coming-of-age narrative arc, leaving behind youthful naivete and innocence as she comes to better understand the challenges of adulthood in an unjust society.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Published in 1969, the same year that Collier’s story debuted, Angelou’s controversial and influential memoir describes the painful effects of discrimination, poverty, and loneliness on the author and her family during her childhood years. This fully-developed autobiographical novel is able to do what a brief story cannot: trace the protagonist’s struggles to a point at which she overcomes them as she matures into a more hopeful young woman.
The Man Who Was Almost a Man by Richard Wright
The main character in Wright’s story, seventeen-year-old Dave Saunders, is a Black field hand who feels powerless to assert his right to respect and self-determination in the Depression-era rural South. Like Lizabeth, Dave seeks relief from his angry helplessness in thoughts of violence, but the target of his anger is not benign, as is Miss Lottie with her flowers. Rather, Dave wants to strike back against those that treat him “like a mule,” not a man.
