Lorraine Hansberry termed her best work, and he adapted many of her writings into the play "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", which was the longest-running Off Broadway play of the 1968–69 season. It appeared in book form the following year under the title "To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words". She left behind an unfinished novel and several other plays, including "The Drinking Gourd" and "What Use Are Flowers?", with a range of content, from slavery to a post-apocalyptic future. "Raisin", a musical based on "A Raisin in the Sun," opened in New York in 1973,
What Is a Nation? and continues to be invoked. Political historian Karl Deutsch, in a quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to Renan, said that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours". Benedict Anderson's 1983 work Imagined Communities, which states that a nation is an "imagined political community", argues that Renan contradicts himself when he says French people must have forgotten the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, yet does not explain what it is. In other words, Renan assumes that all his readers will remember the very massacre he says they have forgotten.