Drought is the main limiting factor of maize productivity, therefore improving drought tolerance in maize has potential practical importance. Cloning and functional verification of drought-tolerant genes is of great importance to understand molecular mechanisms under drought stress. Here, we employed a bioinformatic pipeline to identify 42 drought responsive genes using previously reported maize transcriptomic datasets. The coding sequences, exon-intron structure and domain organization of all the 42 genes were identified. Phylogenetic analysis revealed evolutionary conservation of members of the genes in maize. Several regulatory elements associated with drought tolerance were identified in the promoter regions of genes, indicating the implication of these genes in plant response to drought stress. 42 genes were distributed unevenly on 10 chromosomes, and 24 pairs of gene duplications were the segmental duplication. The expression of several genes was upregulated under drought stress, and overexpressing transgenic plants exhibited higher SOD and POD activities and higher accumulation of soluble proteins under drought stress which resulted in enhanced developed phenotype and improved resistance. The present study provides evidence for the evolutionary conservation of HD-ZIP transcription factors homologs in maize. The results further provide a comprehensive insight into the roles of genes in regulating drought stress tolerance in maize.