A short life of the author
Joel Chandler Harris (9 December 1848 – 3 July 1908) was an American journalist, folklorist, and author who preserved one of the most important bodies of African American oral tradition in his Uncle Remus tales — stories told by a fictional elderly Black man to a white child on a plantation, featuring Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and the Tar-Baby. The tales, drawn from the trickster traditions of West African and enslaved African American storytelling, are works of considerable literary and anthropological importance. They are also, in their framing narrative of a contented Black storyteller in a benevolent plantation setting, among the most contested texts in American literature.
Life
Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the illegitimate son of an Irish labourer who abandoned the family. At thirteen he went to work at Turnwold, a plantation owned by Joseph Addison Turner, who published a newspaper, The Countryman, on his estate. It was at Turnwold that Harris first heard the animal tales told by enslaved people in the plantation’s slave quarters — stories that he absorbed with an ear trained by his own painful shyness (he had a severe stammer) to attend closely to other people’s voices.
After the Civil War he became a journalist, working for newspapers in Macon, New Orleans, and Savannah before joining the Atlanta Constitution in 1876, where he spent the rest of his career. He began publishing the Uncle Remus stories in the Constitution in 1879; they were an immediate success.
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880)
The first collection established the form: Uncle Remus, an elderly formerly enslaved man, tells animal stories to “the little boy,” the young son of a plantation owner. The stories themselves — Brer Rabbit outwitting Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and other larger, stronger animals through cunning, deception, and a cheerful disregard for fair play — derive from the Anansi spider trickster tradition of West African folklore, transmitted and transformed through generations of enslaved African Americans.
The Tar-Baby story — in which Brer Fox creates a figure made of tar to trap Brer Rabbit, who becomes stuck when he strikes the silent figure — is one of the most widely known folktales in the world, with variants across African, Native American, and Asian traditions. Harris’s version, rendered in careful phonetic dialect, became the definitive English-language retelling.
The Dialect
Harris’s use of African American Vernacular English — rendered in elaborate phonetic spellings that modern readers find difficult — was his most important contribution as a folklorist and his most problematic legacy. The dialect is not invented; Harris was an extraordinarily careful listener who recorded speech patterns with genuine accuracy. Linguists have praised the fidelity of his transcriptions. But the phonetic spellings also served, intentionally or not, to mark the language as deviant and comic — a “broken” version of standard English rather than a legitimate linguistic system.
The Controversy
The Uncle Remus stories raise questions that have no simple answers. Harris was a white man who grew up in a slave society, who presented Black storytelling within a frame narrative of plantation nostalgia, and who profited from cultural material that was not his own. The framing narrative — Uncle Remus as a contented, loyal former slave who entertains the master’s grandchild — is, at best, a sentimental distortion of the reality of enslaved life.
At the same time, the tales themselves are genuine African American folklore of great cultural importance. The trickster figure of Brer Rabbit — small, weak, clever, amoral, and always victorious over stronger enemies — is clearly a figure through whom enslaved people expressed their understanding of power, resistance, and survival. Harris, whatever his limitations as an interpreter, preserved stories that might otherwise have been lost.
Critical Standing
Harris occupies a paradoxical position: acknowledged as an important folklorist and condemned as a purveyor of plantation mythology. The animal tales have been retold by subsequent African American writers — most notably by Julius Lester in his Tales of Uncle Remus series (1987–1994), which preserves the stories while removing the plantation frame. Disney’s Song of the South (1946), based on the Uncle Remus stories, has been effectively suppressed by Disney itself due to its racial content.
Collecting Harris
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880, D. Appleton) in first edition with the original illustrations by Frederick S. Church and James H. Moser is a major American first-edition collectible, bringing $2,000–$8,000 in fine condition. Nights with Uncle Remus (1883) firsts are $500–$1,500. His non-Uncle Remus fiction — particularly Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887) — is modestly priced and undervalued.