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The Library of Congress is pleased to announce the online release of
The Zora Neale Hurston Plays at the Library of Congress, available on
the American Memory Web site at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/znhhtml
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Office between 1925 and 1944, most of the plays remained unpublished and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unpublished when they were rediscovered in the Library of Congress in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.
American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating
to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more
than 8 million digital items from more than 120 historical collections.
Please submit any questions you may have via the American Memory web
form at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-memory2.html
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