Although it was set several decades earlier, the play debuted in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the same year.

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) wrote A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America (1993). Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). August Wilson wrote Fences (1987). Adrienne Kennedy wrote A Lesson in Dead Language (1968). All of these authors are major award-winning, twentieth-century American playwrights.

Langston Hughes’ famous poem “Harlem” (also called “A Dream Deferred”) (1951) likens a delayed dream to a grape that withers into a raisin in the sun.

A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by an African-American playwright to debut on Broadway, and it did so in 1959.

The play is set in midcentury Chicago and reflects, among other social concerns of that (and this) time, racist housing policies. While the play was inspired by Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem" (1951), the play was definitively set in Chicago, and the connection to "Harlem" was based on a metaphorical image (of a grape withering in the sun).

American playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) wrote  Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), one of his most famous plays. Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman (1949). Tennessee Williams wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America (1993). Henrik Ibsen (the only non-American in the answer options) wrote Hedda Gabler (1890).

The play takes place over the course of a single day in the lives of a dysfunctional Connecticut family. Although the play is extremely lavish in its description of the setting, all of the action of the play is restricted to that one location.

Inspired by the works of realist playwrights such as Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a highly realist work of drama. The work, as it is realist, cannot also be surrealist. Postmodernism and post-structuralism are near synonyms, and are anachronous to O'Neil's play.

Our Town (1938) is by the American playwright Thornton Wilder (1897-1975). It is one of his earlier works. August Strindberg wrote A Dream Play (1901). Sam Shepard wrote The Right Stuff (1983). August Wilson wrote The Coldest Day of the Year (1989). Lorraine Hansberry wrote The Drinking Gourd (1960). Aside from Strindberg, all of these playwrights are American.

In Our Town (1938), the setting is the theater itself and the narrator, a stage manager, is both aware of and allowed to interact with the audience. This technique is commonly known as “breaking the fourth wall” (meaning the invisible barrier between the actors and the audience).