EmoryFindingAids : Joel Chandler Harris papers, 1862-1978 : Series 2: Writings, 1860-1908 Boxes 8-13, OP 62-204 Scope and Content Note As an author and a newspaperman, Joel Chandler Harris wrote books, poems, short stories and essays, book reviews, introductions to other people's works, letters to editors, editorials, newspaper columns and a play. This series contains examples of each, either in Harris's handwriting, type, or copies from newspapers and magazines. Drafts or partial drafts of Harris's books and book length manuscripts and a box of publishers' page proofs begin the writing series. Some of the drafts included here are fairly clean with few corrections made on the page and with wording closely resembling that found in the published versions of the story. An example of this is the manuscript copy of Aaron in the Wildwoods. Other drafts reveal what was probably Harris's usual method of writing stories and novels -- he drafted and redrafted, revised chapter order, changed section titles, and added and removed pages.

The draft of The Shadow Between His Shoulder Blades contains a completed copy as well as several false starts and partial drafts. All of these drafts, including the completed one, differ from the published version. In fact, the serialized novel, which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and was published by Small, Maynard and Company, is told by Billy Sanders, a character who does not appear in the drafts. There are also two manuscripts which were never finished: "Qua: A Romance of Revolution" and "Gems of Southern Poetry." A third manuscript, "The Romance of Rockville," was serialized in Atlanta Constitution but never published in book form. Page proofs follow at the end of the manuscripts. The series contains nine sets of book reviews written for the Uncle Remus Magazine and unidentified periodicals. Those appearing in the former were published under the pseudonym "Anne McFarland." With one exception, these are typescripts or published copies. These are arranged in alphabetical order according to the title of Harris's review. Editorials included in the series were written primarily for The Saturday Evening Post and the Uncle Remus Magazine, the editorials address the "Negro problem," responsibilities of newspapers and their editors, American business interests, and human virtues among other topics.

Most were written in the late 1890s and the early 1900s. Editorials written for the Uncle Remus Magazine were generally labeled "Mr. Billy Sanders' Views." Harris wrote the introductions and prefaces to eight books authored mostly by fellow Southerners. This section of writings contains drafts for three of these introductions and a short introductory essay written for The Book of Fun and Frolick, which Harris edited. A signed penciled draft introducing fellow Constitution editor Frank L. Stanton's Song of the Soil is here, as well as false starts, partial drafts and final drafts for the introductions to Fun and Frolic and two other volumes. The series also includes ten letters Harris sent to editors of The Century, Atlanta Constitution, The Critic, The Nation, The News, and the New York Evening Post are filed here. Topics include the Congressional debate over the proposed copyright bill of the 1880s, general commentary on Georgia politician Thomas E. Watson, sanitation in Atlanta, and national prosperity. Most of these are in Harris's handwriting; some are also signed. The letters date from the 1880s to the 1900s.

From 1862 to 1900, Harris was in the newspaper business. In the course of those years, he wrote many editorials, paragraphs, news reports, poems and stories for publication. The series includes loose clippings and two scrapbooks of columns Harris wrote for the Savannah Morning News and Atlanta Constitution. Reprints of columns and articles which appeared in other Georgia papers and paragraphs are also found in the scrapbooks. They probably date from the 1870s, while the columns found in the folders were written in the following two decades. The scrapbooks contain some of Harris's earliest writings and document his rising reputation as a newspaperman. Some of his original retellings of plantation stories can be found here. The oldest items in the Harris collection are a notebook and an essay Harris wrote while still a young boy. The notebook dates from the 1860s and is filled with short essays, poems, stories and copies of letters to editors. Harris apparently used the journal to practice his writing skills. Topics mentioned in the notebook vary but common themes are the Civil War and the South. Several entries are signed and some are dated.

Poems and letters originally laid in this notebook have been moved to the first folder of the Poetry section of Writings and to the first folder of General Correspondence in Subseries 1.3. A second folder contains a boyhood essay Harris wrote on "The Elephants" at the Eatonton Male Academy in September 1858. Fourteen essays written by fellow students on the same date on similar topics are also filed here. Parts of two drafts plus several false starts and rejected pages of "Herndon Wood: A Plantation Comedy" reveal Harris's attempts at playwriting. Written in the 1880s or 1890s, the play was never published or produced. There are outlines included in the drafts which give the setting, characters, and dialog for two to four acts. The play concerns life in Georgia in the Reconstruction days of 1869. As a young man, Joel Chandler Harris was very interested in writing and reading poetry. Indeed, in the 1860s he began collecting copies of poems by Southerners for a book he planned to compile entitled "Gems of Southern Poetry" (See Books and Book-Length Manuscripts).

By mid-life, Harris had grown more interested in other types of writings; most of his later poems were actually Uncle Remus rhymes in dialect. These folders contain poems he wrote from his youth to 1905. Handwritten and typed drafts as well as copies of poems which appeared in magazines and newspapers are filed here. The collection also includes short stories and nonfiction essays from 1880 to 1908 that are divided into manuscript and published sections. The manuscript versions include both early drafts which were greatly revised before publication and final, clean drafts. Several are unfinished and untitled. The published works are articles Harris wrote which appeared in national magazines or as reprints in Emory University publications. Some of the articles are segments of serialized novels or books composed of three or four short stories which were later published in book form. Copies of articles appearing in the Uncle Remus Magazine are not in this section. The miscellaneous and fragmentary writings include unidentified fragments, three travel letters about a trip Harris took, and programs, advertisements and pamphlets which contain short paragraphs and stories written by Harris. Arrangement Note Arranged by record type.

Restrictions on Access Special restrictions apply: Due to the fragile nature of the originals, researchers are required to use the microfilm copy. Microfilm copy [see content details below] Box Joel Chandler Harris (1845-1908) | New Georgia Encyclopedia Joel Chandler Harris (1845-1908) R. Bruce Bickley , Florida State University, Tallahassee, 07/18/2002 Last edited by NGE Staff on 09/04/2013 Explore This Article Late Career One of the South's most treasured authors, Joel Chandler Harris gained national prominence for his numerous volumes of Uncle Remus folktales. Harris's long-standing legacy as a "progressive conservative" New South journalist, folklorist, fiction writer, and children's author continues to influence our society today. Early Life and Education Joel Chandler Harris on December 9, 1845 (not 1848, as traditionally believed). His mother, Mary Ann Harris, had left Richmond County to live in Eatonton—the original hometown of her maternal grandmother, Tabitha Turman—with her lover.

Harris's father, however, whose identity is uncertain, deserted his young family shortly after his son's birth. Leading Eatonton citizen Dr. Andrew Reid befriended Mary and Joel, giving them a small cottage to live in behind his own mansion. To make herself financially independent, Mary Harris took in sewing and helped neighbors with gardening. She also gave young Joel constant attention, reciting middle Georgia pioneer stories and reading Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield aloud so regularly that he memorized whole passages. When Harris reached school age, Andrew Reid stepped forward again and paid his tuition at Kate Davidson's local academy for boys and girls. Harris later attended the Eatonton Academy for boys. One of his teachers recalled his excellent memory and writing ability. He also devoured newspapers and as many books as he could find. His classmates remembered that the undersized, carrot-topped, freckled-faced boy had a robust sense of humor and was an inveterate practical joker. In part, his joking and pranking may have been a way of masking a slight stammer, which was a lifelong affliction.

Early Career: The Turnwold Years Gifted with a strong memory and a love of books, writing skills and a mischievous sense of humor, Harris was hired in March 1862 at age sixteen as a printing compositor for Joseph Addison Turner , the owner of 1,000-acre Turnwold Plantation. The semirestored plantation house and the historical marker commemorating Turnwold and Harris's years there are located nine miles northeast of Eatonton on Old Phoenix Road. A country squire of the Thomas Jefferson mold, Turner aimed "to cultivate corn , cotton , and literature ." He had installed an old Washington hand press in a building behind the main house and was ready to publish what was probably America's only plantation newspaper, The Countryman. Harris's four years at Turnwold (1862-66) shaped his career in profound ways. Like Benjamin Franklin a century earlier, and like contemporaries Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Harris learned to write by hand-setting newspaper type as a young man. He began composing lines of type at Turner's elbow.

Turner soon obtained a draft exemption for Harris because of his undersized build—and because his work for a paper loyal to the Southern cause aided the war effort. Turner gave Harris fatherly advice and expanded his education in the liberal arts by recommending books from his vast personal library. An avid sectionalist, Turner endorsed Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Timrod but also stressed Dickens and Shakespeare. He encouraged Harris to write creatively and critically. Harris published at least thirty poems and book reviews for The Countryman, along with numerous comic paragraphs over the byline "The Countryman's Devil." Harris also had full access to Turnwold's slave quarters and to the kitchen, where he listened to African American animal stories told by Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy. These slaves became models for Uncle Remus, Aunt Tempy, and other figures in the African American animal tales Harris began writing a decade later. Harris's fictionalized autobiography , On the Plantation (1892), chronicles the influence of the Turnwold years on his development. The people he met and the stories he heard, the literary sensibility he began to cultivate there, and several physical features of the extensive middle Georgia plantation property itself informed Harris's writing.

Journalistic Endeavours In 1864 Union troops under General William T. Sherman ransacked Turnwold, stealing valuables, including horses and livestock, on their march to the sea . Destruction on neighboring plantations was far worse, but nevertheless on May 8, 1866, Turner reluctantly had to suspend operations. Harris found himself a published author at age twenty, and he had also learned that writing was in his blood. After a brief homecoming in Eatonton, Harris took a typesetting job in 1866 for the Macon Telegraph , some forty miles south, but he found that writing only routine journalism did not satisfy his expanding literary ambitions. After serving briefly as personal secretary to William Evelyn, publisher of the New Orleans Crescent Monthly, Harris returned home to accept the job of editor with the Monroe Advertiser of Forsyth, forty miles southwest of Eatonton. Harris enjoyed his years (1867-70) on the staff of this lively weekly owned by James P. Harrison, who had worked for Turner and also knew Harris.

His sketches of rural Georgia life and character, book reviews, puns, and humorous paragraphs were widely reprinted and soon gained him a statewide reputation. In the fall of 1870 he was offered the position of associate editor on the highly respected Savannah Morning News . William Tappan Thompson , whose "Major Jones" sketches were second only in popularity to Augustus Baldwin Longstreet 's Georgia Scenes, was the founder and editor of the paper. In Savannah, Harris returned to a heritage of Georgia humor at its best. Harris's comic and human-interest paragraphs in his "Affairs of Georgia" column for the Morning News were regularly reprinted around the state as "Hot shots from Red Hair-is," "Harris Sparks," and "Red-Top Flashes." Harris also wrote editorials for the Morning News about compromised morality and "shifty" politicians that revealed the humane and democratic philosophy he espoused throughout his personal and professional life. While he was living at the Florida House (later part of the Marshall House) in Savannah, he courted and fell in love with a fellow resident, French Canadian Esther LaRose, the daughter of a steamer captain who plied the Georgia-Florida coast. They married in April 1873.

When a deadly yellow fever epidemic hit Savannah in August 1876, the Harris family, which now included two children, moved to higher ground in Atlanta to wait out the epidemic. (One of these children, Julian Harris , later became a writer and editor in his own right.) In September 1876 Atlanta Constitution editor Evan Howell and his outspoken new associate editor Henry W. Grady hired the young journalist whose paragraphs they had already been reprinting. He was soon named associate editor. Harris quickly discovered that Atlanta had become not only the fastest-growing city in the Southeast but also the very center of what Grady, a decade later, famously described as the New South. Harris soon was recognized as one of the country's most important chroniclers of the changing face of the Old South become New. A Literary Awakening: Uncle Remus Collections Harris's Constitution editorials expanded on the social, political, and literary themes he had begun exploring in Forsyth and Savannah—themes he would also treat both directly and indirectly in his folktales and fiction to come.

Turnwold Plantation When he was asked to fill in for absent dialect-writer Sam Small, he invented an engaging black character named Uncle Remus , who liked dropping by the Constitution offices to share humorous anecdotes and sardonic insights about life on the streets of bustling postwar Atlanta. But an article Harris read on African American folklore in Lippincott's, which included a transcribed story of "Buh Rabbit and the Tar Baby," reminded him of the Brer Rabbit trickster stories he had heard from the slaves at Turnwold Plantation. His Uncle Remus character now began to tell old plantation folktales, back-home aphorisms, and slave songs, and newspapers around the country eagerly reprinted his rural legends and sayings. Before long, Harris had composed enough material for a book. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings—The Folklore of the Old Plantation was published by Appleton in November 1880. Within four months it had sold 10,000 copies and was quickly reprinted. Harris eventually wrote 185 of the tales. For the next quarter-century, Harris lived a double life professionally.

He was one of two associate editors of the premier newspaper in the Southeast, helping readers interpret the complex New South movement. He was also the creative writer, the "other fellow," as he termed himself: a prolific, committed, and ambitious re-creator of folk stories, a literary comedian, fiction writer, and author of children's books. Harris published thirty-five books in his lifetime, in addition to writing thousands of articles for the Constitution over a twenty-four-year period. Along with his first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the most ambitious of the Uncle Remus volumes is Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (1883). This book comprises seventy-one tales that feature stories told by four different black narrators, including Uncle Remus. Harris published five other collections of Uncle Remus tales in his lifetime, the most accomplished of which is Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905). In this volume, a seemingly ageless Uncle Remus tells his complex allegorical tales to the son of the little boy from the first stories.

This frail, citified, and "unduly repressed" child is sent by Miss Sally, his grandmother, to Remus's knee to learn how to be a real boy in a complex, competitive, and even predatory world. Three shorter volumes of previously uncollected Uncle Remus stories appeared after Harris's death. The Uncle Remus volumes assured Harris's reputation, which became international almost overnight. Professional folklorists praised his work in popularizing black storytelling traditions . In 1888 Harris was named a charter member, with Mark Twain, of the American Folklore Society. Before long, in fact, publishing local dialect tales became an international phenomenon: Harris helped spawn a whole industry. Twain had been so impressed by Harris's dialect-writing skills that he had invited Harris in 1882 to meet him and George Washington Cable in New Orleans, Louisiana, to plan an ambitious series of platform readings around the country. Because of his persistent stammer, however, Harris turned down the lucrative offer. The future author of Huckleberry Finn took some of Harris's material on the road with him, and Twain reported later that the tar baby story was always one of his most popular stage-readings.

Harris also left his impact on major literary figures to come. Rudyard Kipling, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor , Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison all responded to the legacy of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby that Harris had helped popularize. Fellow Eatonton writer Alice Walker protested, however, that Harris had stolen her African American folklore heritage and had made it a white man's publishing commodity. Short Stories and Novels Harris was a much more ambitious writer than he implied in his typically self-effacing public statements about being "an accidental author." Joel Chandler Harris He had been writing literary reviews for two decades before he moved to Atlanta, and he had published his first attempt at extended fiction—a somewhat clumsy episodic love story, The Romance of Rockville —as a serialized novel in the Constitution in 1878. Yet Harris took his work as a fiction writer seriously, and he honed his craft considerably in the course of publishing seven volumes of short stories (in addition to the Uncle Remus tales) and three more novels. In his local-color short fiction and novels, Harris explored the lighter and the darker sides of conflicts in race, class, and gender in the South.

Harris published his first collection of short stories, Mingo and Other Sketchesin Black and White, in 1884, followed by Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887), Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories (1891), and an interlocking set of narratives, The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899). Among the best of Harris's local-color stories are "Free Joe and the Rest of the World," a poignant and regularly anthologized story about an isolated black freedman scorned by black slaves and resented by poor whites ; "Mingo," a study in prejudice and resentment between upper-class and lower-class white families; "At Teague Poteet's," a Georgia moonshiner tale that also influenced Huckleberry Finn; and several of the energetic and highly engaging Minervy Ann narratives. The title story of The Making of a Statesman and Other Stories (1902) is a modern narrative about the personal sacrifices a ghostwriter makes in order to help a politician be successful.

Books for Children Harris's Uncle Remus volumes are simultaneously adult folktales and children's literature because the Brer Rabbit trickster tales work on multiple levels, as voluminous scholarship on these stories confirms. But Harris also wrote six volumes of stories primarily for children: Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894) and its sequel, Mr. Rabbit at Home (1895); The Story of Aaron (1896) and its companion volume, Aaron in the Wildwoods (1897); and another tandem set of stories, Plantation Pageants (1899) and Wally Wanderoon and His Story-Telling Machine (1903). Harris's recreation of believable and engaging critters, particularly in his Brer Rabbit tales, virtually revolutionized the modern children's story. Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, Howard Garis's Uncle Wiggly, and A. A.

Milne's Pooh Bear—not to mention a whole herd of film and television reincarnations of trickster Brer Rabbit and his gullible adversaries—are all reinventions of Harris's highly animated creatures that talk and behave "de same ez folks." Late Career Harris retired from the Atlanta Constitution in 1900, free at last of what he termed the "newspaper grind" but leaving an influential legacy Joel Chandler Harris as a "progressive conservative"—a New South journalist who actively promoted socioeconomic, sectional, and racial reconciliation. In addition to publishing the final volumes of Uncle Remus stories, children's books, and adult fiction, he founded Uncle Remus's Magazine, was honored by President Theodore Roosevelt in Atlanta and at the White House, and was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Harris died on July 3, 1908, of acute nephritis and was buried in Westview Cemetery, West End, Atlanta. Obituary writers were not exaggerating when they eulogized this celebrated middle Georgia writer as "the most beloved man in America." Only Harris's friend and admirer, Mark Twain, who died two years later, surpassed Harris in popular reputation at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Harris's retelling of the story of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby remains one of the world's best-known folktales, and his complex legacy as a literary comedian, New South journalist, folklorist, fiction writer, and children's author continues to influence modern culture in a surprising number of ways. Wren's Nest Harris's fully restored Victorian home and museum house in Atlanta, the Wren's Nest, located off I-20 at 1050 Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard S.W., has served as the headquarters for the Joel Chandler Harris Association (previously called the Uncle Remus Memorial Association) since 1913. The Uncle Remus Museum on 214 Oak Street in Eatonton, comprising two authentic mid-nineteenth-century hewn-log slave cabins, contains Harris memorabilia and a diorama of scenes from the folktales. In 2000 Harris was inducted as a charter member into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame .

You Might Also Like Joel Chandler Harris | Today In Georgia History Winner of two 2013 Emmy Awards from the Southeast Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Today in Georgia History is a joint collaboration of the Georgia Historical Society & Georgia Public Broadcasting. December 9 Joel Chandler Harris December 9, 1845 - Eatonton, Atlanta, Savannah Joel Chandler Harris was a New South journalist, a folklorist, and one of Georgia’s most famous authors. He was born in Eatonton in 1845. Like Ben Franklin, Harris learned to write by hand-setting newspaper type, working at Turnwold Plantation for Joseph Addison Turner. After working in Macon and Savannah, Harris went to work for Henry Grady at the Atlanta Constitution, and it would be his home for the next 25 years. During that time he would also write a series of stories that are still an important part of the American folklore tradition – the tales of Uncle Remus. At Turnwold, Harris spent time with the plantation slaves listening to African-American “trickster” tales, traditional among oppressed peoples, about how a weaker but cunning trickster overcomes a stronger but dimwitted adversary.

Harris adapted these “dialect” stories and published them in 1880. Their popularity brought him international fame. Harris influenced other writers like Rudyard Kipling and Beatrix Potter, and his legacy can be found in nearly every animal cartoon character of the 20th century. One of America’s most renowned folklorists was born on December 9, 1845, Today in Georgia History. Joel Chandler Harris | American author | Britannica.com Joel Chandler Harris Joel Chandler Harris, (born Dec. 9, 1848, Eatonton, Ga., U.S.—died July 3, 1908, Atlanta ), American author, creator of the folk character Uncle Remus. Joel Chandler Harris Courtesy of the Emory University Library, Atlanta As apprentice on a weekly paper, The Countryman, he became familiar with the lore and dialects of the plantation slave. He established a reputation as a brilliant humorist and writer of dialect while employed on newspapers at Macon, Ga., New Orleans , Forsyth and Savannah, Ga., and, after 1876, on the staff of the Atlanta Constitution for 24 years.

In 1879 “Tar-Baby,” a story probably inspired by his reading of William Owens’ work on black folklore , appeared in the Atlanta Constitution and created a vogue for a distinctive type of dialect literature . This and successive Uncle Remus stories won for Harris a secure place in American literature . The pattern was new: Uncle Remus, the wise, genial old black man, tells stories about Brer Rabbit , Brer Fox, and other animals to the little son of a plantation owner and interweaves his philosophy of the world about him. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings was published in book form in 1880, followed by others. Included in a series of children’s books were: Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country (1894), The Story of Aaron (1896), and Aaron in the Wildwoods (1897).

Mingo, and Other Sketches in Black and White (1884); Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887); Sister Jane, Her Friends and Acquaintances (1896); and Gabriel Tolliver (1902) reveal Harris’ ability to vitalize other Southern types and to delve into issues faced by the South after Reconstruction. On the Plantation (1892) is valuable for its autobiography . From 1907 until his death he edited Uncle Remus’s Magazine. Learn More in these related articles: Uncle Remus and Joel Chandler Harris : Southern U.S.A Culture, History & Travel BRER COON ORIGIN “How Brer Coon Gets His Meat” is based on a short story called “Crazy Sue’s Story” collected by famed Georgia author, folklorist and journalist Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908). “Crazy Sue’s Story” appeared in a collection of stories entitled Daddy Jake the Runaway and Short Stories Told After Dark, published in 1889. Harris is best known, of course, for the Uncle Remus tales featuring Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and other famous animal characters.

Like the Uncle Remus tales, the stories found in Daddy Jake were African-American myth-legends that Harris heard from slaves while he was working on a plantation nearhis birthplace in Eatonton, Georgia. Harris had an extraordinarily sensitive ear and accurate memory, and wrote the stories as closely to the spoken versions as he could. The cultural origins of the Daddy Jake stories are hard to trace. Folklorists argue that similar stories can be found in European and Native American cultures. Since these groups interacted with African-Americans during the United States’s early history, a sharing of these stories is entirely possible. “Crazy Sue’s Story” is told by a fictional character named Crazy Sue, a runaway slave, to two white children named Lucien and Lillian Gaston. The Gaston children have left their father’s plantation to search for another runaway slave named Daddy Jake. As the story begins, the two children have found Daddy Jake sitting around a campfire with his friends, laughing and telling stories. The children are thrilled to find him, and fully expect him to return with them to the Gaston plantation. While sitting around the fire, Lillian asks why the frogs in the swamp are making so much noise.

The following is Crazy Sue’s response (dialect and text taken from the original story): “I speck it’s kaze dey er mad wid Mr. Rabbit,” said Crazy Sue. “Dey ertryin’ der best ter drive ‘im out’n de swamp.” “What are they mad with the Rabbit for?” asked Lucien, thinking there might be a story in the explanation. “Hit’s one er dem ole-time fusses,” said Crazy Sue. “Hit’s most too oleter talk about.” “Don’t you know what the fuss is about?” asked Lucien. And so, the story begins… JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS The name Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) is not nearly as well known as that of the famous character he created, Uncle Remus. Many visitors to Harris’s home in Atlanta, Georgia have been surprised to find that the author of the beloved Uncle Remus stories was not a aged black man, but aportly and shy white journalist. Harris was a progressive thinking Southerner with deep concerns about post-Civil War reconstruction in general and race relations in particular.

Although he had literary ambitions, his greatest achievement was as a folklorist, when he collected and wrote down slave stories thathe heard while working on a plantation as a young boy. Harris never claimed that he was the author of these stories, but rather a “compiler” of voices that, at that time, were virtually ignored in white America -the black slaves of the Old South. This literary giant was, in reality, a virtual recluse who rarely traveled outside his home. This shyness probably stemmed from his childhood in rural and placid Eatonton, Georgia. His father abandoned him and his mother when he was an infant, and Harris grew up a gawky, nervous and thin boy with red-hair and freckles. By age 14, however, Harris became restless and mustered up enough courage to seek a job as a printer’s devil for Joseph Addison Turner. Turner was editor-publisher of The Countryman, a small country newspaper that he published out of his home at Turnwold Plantation. Turner not only introduced the young Harris to journalism, but also to literature through the books he kept in his well-stocked library.

Most importantly, Harris was exposed to the good and bad aspects of plantation life, which would later provide the setting and characters for his Uncle Remus tales. Harris began his writing career contributing humorous pieces to The Countryman under the by-line, “The Countryman’s Devil.” When the paper eventually shut down after the Civil War, Harris moved on to papers in Macon, New Orleans, Monroe and Savannah, where he continued writing humorous pieces, as well as literary reviews. It was while working in Savannah from 1870-1873 that he met his future wife, Esther LaRose, an 18 year old Catholic girl of French Canadian descent. Harris and his wife eventually had to flee Savannah when an epidemic of yellow fever broke out. By this time, Harris had gained a reputation as a humorist with other newspaper editors, since his amusing columns on local and national matters had been reprinted in various papers over the years. But in his heart, Harris was dissatisfied with journalism as a literary pursuit, and dreamed of publishing his own Southern literary magazine. Harris’s reputation landed him a job as associate editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This job gave him a steady income and a comfortable life.

In 1881, he moved his family into a small farmhouse in Atlanta’s West End called Snap-Bean Farm. He later renovated the farmhouse into a pretty, Queen Anne Victorian home, which he dubbed the “Wren’s Nest” after he found a nest of birds in their wooden mailbox. Here, Harris settled into a routine of taking a mule-driven streetcar to work during the day, followed by an evening of literary writing. He preferred to spend time at home, and rarely traveled. The Wren's Nest (Joel Chandler Harris Home) loading map - please wait... The Wren\'s Nest (Joel Chandler Harris Home) 33.738212, -84.422561 Stories: How Brer Coon Gets His MeatJoel Chandler Harris’ home in Atlanta, GA – not only a house museum, but a preservation center for African-American folklore through storytelling, tours and special events. Along with a humor column, Harris began writing “dialect sketches” for the Constitution when he first joined the staff. Harris’s observations were seen through the eyes of a fictional, humble black commentator named Uncle Remus.

Through these columns, Harris explored African-American dialect throughout the state of Georgia. He had a distaste for what he called “the intolerable misrepresentations of the minstrel stage,” and painstakingly wrote his stories in authentic African-American dialect that he had absorbed as a boy. For someone who never recorded his encounters with slaves, Harris was surprisingly accurate as a self-taught linguist. “The difference between real dialect and lingo,” he once said, “is that the first is preservative, while the latter is destructive, of language. Judged by this standard, the Negro dialect is as perfect as any the world ever saw.” In 1879, Harris wrote a dialect column on the editorial page entitled “Negro Folk Lore.” It was here that one of the Uncle Remus tales, “The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox,” appeared for the first time in print. This story and the ones that followed were a huge success with readers and editors, and were published in newspapers across the country. The next year, these stories were collected and published in a book entitled Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, which was a national sensation.

The man who had modestly dubbed himself a “cornfield journalist” and an “accidental author” was, seemingly overnight, a national celebrity. The Uncle Remus tales brought Harris a lot of attention from learned men, who proclaimed him an expert on African-American folklore. One of his admirers was Mark Twain, who invited Harris to join him on a lucrative joint lecture tour. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt singled out Harris’s work as an important contribution to reuniting the country after the Civil War, and even invited him to the White House. But Harris was never comfortable with his notoriety, and the continued pressure to speak publicly made him even more of a recluse. He continued to work for the newspaper until the turn of the century, but centered his attention more on his family and his literary writing. Harris was a common sight writing on the front porch of his home, wearing his trademark black felt hat and spitting into his enameled spittoon. In 1900, Harris left the grind of the newspaper world behind for good, and retired to the Wren’s Nest to concentrate on his literary efforts.

Harris finally realized his dream of publishing a Southern literary magazine when, in 1905, he and his son Julian published the first issueof Uncle Remus’s Magazine. Despite his desire to write other types ofstories, Harris agreed to name the magazine after Uncle Remus to capitalize on his fame. The magazine became another success for Harris, with over 200,000 subscribers. But by this time, Harris was in poor health. Already dogged by constant illnesses and the tragic deaths of two of his grandchildren, Harris weakened under the strain of publishing a magazine. In 1908, he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, and died peacefully at his home shortly thereafter. Harris would eventually write 30 books, and his Uncle Remus tales were translated into 27 different languages. The most popular tale, “The Wonderful Tar Baby,” was the focus of the Walt Disney movie Song of the South, which introduced Harris’s work to a new and younger audience. Despite his considerable accomplishments, however, Harris would, in death, become a controversial figure in some quarters.

After the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, depictions of Old South slaves in literature and in the mass media were shunned by a younger generation of African-Americans. The fact that Harris was a white man presenting the authentic (some would incorrectly call it “uneducated”) dialect of black slaves made the issue even more racially-sensitive. It is admittedly difficult to judge how much of the Uncle Remus material is a true record of African-American folklore, and how much is Harris’s creation. But if Joel Chandler Harris didn’t record the dialect and stories of theslaves, and publish them for the masses at that time, who would have? Harris intended for his stories to bridge the gap between the races and heal the wounds of the Civil War. The continued popularity of his writings proves that Harris, in many ways, achieved these lofty goals. UNCLE REMUS Uncle Remus, the literary character who would eventually become a worldwide phenomenon, had a modest beginning in a small newspaper columnin Atlanta, Georgia. In 1876, a humor columnist named Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) began contributing African-American dialect sketches to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

These columns were based on the stories and dialect he absorbed from slaves while working on a plantation near his boyhoodhome of Eatonton, Georgia. Harris wanted to promote an understanding between the races in the post-Civil War South, and to give white Americaa rare glimpse into African culture. One of his first columns, “Jeems Rober’son’s Last Illness” (1876), featured an unnamed black man waiting on a train to Jonesboro, Georgia. The black man had to be coaxed to finish his story for the reading audience at the risk of missing his train. Weeks later, Harris came up with a name for this fictional narrator: Uncle Remus. Remus would comment on the current Atlanta scene and express his preference for plantation life in the Old South. In the columns that followed, Uncle Remus’ personal history on the plantation began to unfold. Three years later, the first Uncle Remus tale, “The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox,” appeared on the editorial page under the heading, “Negro Folk Lore.” The columns appeared intermittently in the Atlanta paper, and were an immediate success.

Now, Uncle Remus was an aging slave who chose to remain on the plantation after the Civil War. He tells his stories to a little white boy who is the son of Miss Sally, a Southern woman, and John Huntingdon, a Union officer. Oddly enough, the audience later learned that Uncle Remus once wounded the Union soldier in defense of Miss Sally during the war, and stayed on the plantation out of obligation to both the original family and to the wounded officer. Understandably, many readers found Uncle Remus’s positive attitude toward slavery to be distasteful. But at the time, Harris’s columns won widespread acceptance from guilt-ridden Southerners who wanted to believe that slave life in the antebellum South wasn’t so bad. They also introduced Northern audiences to a warm and homely side of plantation life that they had never experienced before. Whether they were completely accurate from a historical perspective or not, the Uncle Remus tales, in some small way, helped foster racial healing when it was needed most. Unlike other accounts of plantation life at that time, the Uncle Remus tales moved the focus from the “big house”to the slave cabins, from white to black.

Harris’s stories were amazingly detailed about everyday slave life, right down to how they made shoe pegs and baked yams and ashcakes. Harris painstakingly wrote his stories in authentic African-American dialect, with many words in Gullah. Like Aesop’s Fables, the characters in the Uncle Remus tales were frequently “critters”: Brer Fox, Brer B’ar, Brer Wolf and so forth. The most popular, of course, was Brer Rabbit, a trickster whose occasionally amoral acts were not always approved of by Harris himself. But the Uncle Remus tales were meant to be entertaining, not moral lessons. Whenever Harris would intervene in his stories, he would tell his audience through Uncle Remus that the animals’ conduct shouldn’t always be considered proper conduct for human beings, and that their acts were frequently lessons in the art of survival. This is in keeping with African tradition, where overt moralizing is rare and stories can be amoral and grim. As the Uncle Remus newspaper stories became a national phenomenon, Harris collected them and had them published in an anthology called Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880).

The book was an international hit, and Harris ended up producing nine more volumes of the stories, preserving 183 distinctive tales. Harris never claimed to be the author of these stories, but “only the compiler” of tales he’d heard from others. The Uncle Remus tales were eventually translated into 27 different languages. The enormous popularity of the Uncle Remus tales dwarfed everything else Harris would write. To this day, his name is so synonymous with Uncle Remus that many people believe that he is Uncle Remus. Harris was never comfortable with his fame, and chose to stay at home with his family and his typewriter until his death in 1908. A new and younger audience was introduced to the Uncle Remus tales in the 1940s, when Walt Disney used a tale called “The Wonderful Tar Baby” as the focus of their movie Song of the South. The movie’s centerpiece song,”Zip-a-Dee Doo Da,” won an Academy Award for Best Song in 1946. Walt Disney himself visited Harris’s home that year and donated a diorama built by the Disney studios.

Song of the South continues to be a popular film all over the world, although it is one of the few Disney films to have never been released on home video in the United States. You can buy this definitive book of Uncle Remus tales in our Bookshop. To learn more about Joel Chandler Harris and his writings, follow these links: Harris’ home in Atlanta – not only a house museum, but a preservation center for African-American folklore through storytelling, tours and special events. Uncle Remus Joel Chandler Harris - Joel Chandler Harris Biography - Poem Hunter Joel Chandler Harris - Joel Chandler Harris Biography - Poem Hunter Biography Biography of Joel Chandler Harris Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1845 – July 3, 1908) was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years. He spent the majority of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at the Atlanta Constitution. Harris led two significant professional lives. Editor and journalist Joe Harris ushered in the New South alongside Henry W.

Grady, stressing regional and racial reconciliation during and after the Reconstruction era. Joel Chandler Harris, fiction writer and folklorist, recorded many Brer Rabbit stories from the African-American oral tradition and revolutionized children's literature in the process. Controversy surrounding his southern plantation themes, narrative structure, collection of African-American folklore, use of dialect, and Uncle Remus character, however, has denigrated the significance of Harris' work, especially during the latter half of the 20th century. Harris created the first iteration of the Uncle Remus character for the Atlanta Constitution in 1876 after inheriting a column written by Samuel W. Small, a colleague who had taken leave from the paper. In these character sketches Remus would visit the newspaper office to discuss the social and racial issues of the day. By 1877 Small had returned to the Constitution and resumed his column. Harris had no intention to continue the Remus character. But when Small once again left the paper, Harris reprised Remus and this time realized the literary value of the stories of his youth from the slaves of Turnwold Plantation.

Harris set out to record the stories and insisted that they be verified by two independent sources before he would set them into print. The pursuit proved more and more difficult given his professional duties, urban location, race and, eventually, fame. On July 20, 1879, Harris published "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus" in the Atlanta Constitution. It was the first of 34 plantation fables that would comprise Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings in 1880. The stories, mostly collected directly from the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect, animal personage, and serialized landscape. Remus' stories featured a trickster hero called Br'er Rabbit ("Brother" Rabbit), who used his wits against adversity, though his efforts did not always succeed. Br'er Rabbit is a direct interpretation of Yoruba tales of Hare, though some others posit Native American influences as well. Scholar Stella Brewer Brookes asserts, "Never has the trickster been better exemplified than in the Br'er Rabbit of Harris.

Br'er Rabbit was accompanied by friends and enemies alike, such as Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear, Br'er Terrapin, and Br'er Wolf. The stories represented a significant break from the romantic fairy tales of the Western tradition: instead of a singular event in a singular story, the critters on the plantation existed in an ongoing community saga, time immemorial. The Uncle Remus stories garnered critical acclaim and achieved popular success well into the 20th century. Harris compiled eight books of Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), and Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905). The tales, 185 in sum, became immensely popular among both black and white readers in the North and South. Few outside of the South had ever heard accents like those spoken in the tales, and no one had ever seen the dialect legitimately and faithfully recorded in print.

To the North and those abroad, the stories were a "revelation of the unknown."Mark Twain noted in 1883, "in the matter of writing [the African-American dialect], he is the only master the country has produced." The stories introduced international readers to the American South. Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to Harris that the tales "ran like wild fire through an English Public school..We found ourselves quoting whole pages of Uncle Remus that had got mixed in with the fabric of the old school life." The Uncle Remus tales have since been translated into more than forty languages. James Weldon Johnson called the collection "the greatest body of folklore America has produced." Journalism Early in his career at the Atlanta Constitution, Joe Harris laid out his editorial ideology and set the tone for an agenda that aimed to help reconcile issues of race, class, and region: "An editor must have a purpose.

[...] What a legacy for one's conscience to know that one has been instrumental in mowing down the old prejudices that rattle in the wind like weeds." Harris served as assistant editor and lead editorial writer at the Atlanta Constitution primarily between 1876 and 1900, and published articles intermittently until his death in 1908. While at the Constitution, Harris, "in thousands of signed and unsigned editorials over a twenty-four-year period, [...] set a national tone for reconciliation between North and South after the Civil War." Throughout his career, Joe Harris actively promoted racial reconciliation as well as African-American education, suffrage, and equality. He regularly denounced racism among southern whites, condemned lynching as barbaric, and highlighted the importance of higher education for African Americans, frequently citing the work of W.E.B.

DuBois in his editorials.[26] In 1883, for example, editorials from the Atlanta Constitution challenged those of the New York Sun that alleged "educating the negro will merely increase his capacity for evil." The Atlanta Constitution editorial countered, stating if "education of the negro is not the chief solution of the problem that confronts the white people of the South then there is no other conceivable solution and there is nothing ahead but political chaos and demoralization." Harris' editorials were often progressive in content and paternalistic in tone. Harris was unwavering in his commitment to the "dissipation of sectional jealousy and misunderstanding, as well as religious and racial intolerance", yet "never entirely freed himself of the idea that the [southern whites] would have to patronize the [southern blacks]." Paradoxically, Harris also oversaw some of the Atlanta Constitution's most sensationalized coverage of racial issues, most notably regarding the 1899 torture and lynching of Sam Hose, an African-American farm worker.

Harris resigned from the paper the following year, having lost patience for publishing both "his iconoclastic views on race" and "what was expected of him" at a major southern newspaper during a particularly vitriolic period. In 1904 Harris wrote four important articles for the Saturday Evening Post in discussing the problem of race relations in the South that highlight his progressive yet paternalistic views. Of these, Booker T. Washington noted: "It has been a long time since I have read anything from the pen of any man which has given me such encouragement as your article has. [...] In a speech on Lincoln's Birthday which I am to deliver in New York, I am going to take the liberty to quote liberally from what you have said." Two years later, Harris and his son Julian founded what would become Uncle Remus's Home Magazine. Harris wrote to Andrew Carnegie that its purpose would be to further "the obliteration of prejudice against the blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in the face without blushing.”Circulation reached 240,000 within one year, making it one of the largest magazines in the country.

Other Works Harris wrote novels, narrative histories, translations of French folklore, children's literature, and collections of stories depicting rural life in Georgia. The short stories "Free Joe and the Rest of the World", "Mingo", and "At Teague Poteets" are the most influential of his non-Uncle Remus creative work. Many of his short stories delved into the changing social and economic values in the South during Reconstruction. Harris' turn as a local colorist gave voice to poor white characters and demonstrated his fluency with different African-American dialects and characters. Joel Chandler Harris's Works: Joel Chandler Harris, 1848-1908 Source: From ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOUTHERN CULTURE edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris Copyright (c) 1989 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. Joel Chandler Harris, 1848-1908 Harris, Joel Chandler, (1848-1908) Writer Harris, the illegitimate son of Mary Harris and an Irish laborer, was born on 9 December 1848, near Eatonton, Ga.

His death from nephritis came in Atlanta on 3 July 1908. Harris's formal schooling was spotty, but he read widely in world, English, and American literature, with Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield being his favorite book. His major training came at the hands of Joseph Addison Turner, who edited The Countryman, a weekly newspaper published at the middle Georgia plantation Turnwold. From 1862 to 1866 young Harris worked on the paper, read from Turner's library, and listened to the speech and tales of the plantation blacks. It was his beginning as a writer. Harris worked for several other newspapers before joining the staff of the Atlanta Constitution in 1876 as associate editor. Here he began publishing his famous Uncle Remus stories, using the black dialect he had heard on the plantation. His fame soon spread nationally because of the Uncle Remus tales, and three major Remus books followed: Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), and Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892).

Numerous other volumes of the tales were published both during his lifetime and posthumously. Diverse in taste and talents, Harris also wrote six children's books, all set on a Georgia plantation, and several novelettes and novels—most importantly, Sister Jane: Her Friends and Acquaintances (1896), a novel that depicts antebellum Georgia, and Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of Reconstruction (1902), his major long work. Other ventures into long narrative include an autobiographical novel, On the Plantation (1892), the setting of which is Turnwold. Adept at the short story, Harris produced five collections, the main ones being Mingo, and Other Sketches in Black and White (1884) and Free Joe and Other Georgia Sketches (1887). And with his son Julian he established Uncle Remus's Magazine in 1907. Although Harris disavowed regionalism in art ("My idea is that truth is more important than sectionalism, and that literature that can be labeled Northern, Southern, Western, or Eastern, is not worth labeling at all"), his writings are unsurpassed in reflecting the southern environment.

His short stories are born of the Georgia soil, his novels echo the strains of the Civil War South, his editorials for the Constitution deal with southern social and political issues, and, of course, his famed Uncle Remus tales capture the diction and dialect of the plantation blacks while presenting genuine folk legends. Enlivened with gentle humor and irony, Harris's portraits of the Georgia Negro and his faithful handling of the folk tales constitute his major contributions to southern and American literature. His was a southern voice with a national range. David B. Kesterson North Texas State University R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Joel Chandler Harris (1978), with Karen L. Bickley and Thomas H. English, Joel Chandler Harris: A Reference Guide (1978) Arthur Hobson Quinn, American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (1936); Bernard Wolfe, Commentary (July 1949).

Titles by Joel Chandler Harris available on this site: Joel Chandler Harris (Author of The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus) edit data Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist born in Eatonton, Georgia who wrote the Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus; His Songs and His Sayings, The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1881 & 1882), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1905). The stories, based on the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect and in featuring a trickster hero called Br'er ("Brother") Rabbit, who uses his wits against adversity, though his efforts do not always succeed. The frog is the trickster character in traditional tales in Central and Southern Africa.

The stories, which began appearing in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879, wer Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist born in Eatonton, Georgia who wrote the Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus; His Songs and His Sayings, The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1881 & 1882), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1905). The stories, based on the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect and in featuring a trickster hero called Br'er ("Brother") Rabbit, who uses his wits against adversity, though his efforts do not always succeed. The frog is the trickster character in traditional tales in Central and Southern Africa. The stories, which began appearing in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879, were popular among both Black and White readers in the North and South, not least because they presented an idealized view of race relations soon after the Civil War. The first published Brer Rabbit stories were written by President Theodore Roosevelt's uncle, Robert Roosevelt.

Joel Chandler Harris | The Wren's Nest Joel Chandler Harris Joel Chandler Harris Joel Chandler Harris recreated the oral tradition of the Brer Rabbit tales in print between 1876 and 1908. The success of the Uncle Remus stories made Harris one of the most popular American writers in the 19th and 20th centuries. His first collection, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, has been translated into more than 40 languages and has never gone out of print. Harris collected 194 stories that gave voice to African-American folklore and jumpstarted the folklore movement. Harris worked as a newspaperman nearly his entire life, despite his literary success. As associate editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Harris was a significant voice for the New South and a staunch advocate for regional and racial reconciliation. At the time of his death in 1908, Harris’ popularity as a writer was surpassed only by that of his friend and admirer Mark Twain. If you want to learn more and like to read, do check out these resources:

Question: Joel Chandler Harris wrote which series of stories?
Answer: Uncle Remus