Zora Neale Hurston: Harlem Renaissance playwright

This thesis focuses on the 1997 discovery of Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston's previously unknown play manuscripts—"The Copyright Deposit Plays"—in an effort to broaden the range of academic study on Hurston as an African-American female playwright of the 1920s and 30s. The analysis attempts to understand how Hurston translated the oral history of rural African Americans into her brand of folk plays. This thesis also explores how Hurston's plays promote a distinctive and innovative theatrical portrait of the emerging new African-American persona of the Harlem Renaissance era, breaking free from the denigrating, and still lingering, minstrelsy stereotypes. The examination revolves around plays and skits routinely overlooked for academic critique and theatrical production: Meet the Mama (1925); four skits from the Fast and Furious revue: Forty Yards, Lawing and Jawing, Poker!, and Woofing (1931); and Spunk (1935).