The Zora Neale Hurston Plays collection at the Library of Congress present a selection of ten plays written by Hurston, author, anthropologist, and folklorist. Deposited in the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and unproduced until they were rediscovered in the Copyright Deposit Drama Collection in 1997. The plays reflect Hurston's life experience, travels, and research, especially her study of folklore in the African-American South. Totaling seven hundred images, the scripts are housed in the Library's Manuscript, Music, and Rare Books and Special Collections Divisions. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), the author of the ten plays (with co-authors Langston Hughes on Mule-Bone and Dorothy Waring on Polk County), deposited these scripts with the United States Copyright Office between 1925 and 1944.  Included in the scanned materials are four very short plays (sketches or skits) and six full-length plays.  Most are light-hearted if not outright comedies, and several include song lyrics without the associated music.  Hurston knew the songs and the subjects of these plays from her own upbringing and her professional folklore research in the African-American South.  She identified as her hometown Eatonville, Florida, the first African-American incorporated township.  During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Hurston traveled the American South collecting and recording the sounds and songs of her people, while her research in Haiti is reflected in the voodoo scenes and beliefs woven into several of the plays.  
With the exception of Mule-Bone, the plays presented here were all unpublished when they were rediscovered in the Library of Congress in 1997.  At that time, only Polk County was at all familiar to scholars on the basis of copies in other repositories.  Little was known about Hurston's theatrical career until 1998, when scholarly publications began to reflect the drama discoveries announced by the Library of Congress.  The discovery of the scripts, added to those Hurston plays already known, firmly establishes their author, an African-American woman, as a significant dramatist of the twentieth century.