Joel Chandler Harris

American writer Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) used folklore, fiction, dialect, and other devices of local color to picture both black and white Georgians under slavery and Reconstruction.

Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Ga., the illegitimate son of Mary Harris. Scantily educated, at 13 Harris became an apprentice printer on a little newspaper edited and published by Joseph Addison Turner, a highly literate planter, lawyer, and writer, and learned about writing under Turner's tutelage. Harris then worked on newspapers in several Southern cities. While in Savannah he met and married Esther LaRose; they had nine children. In 1876 Harris began a 24-year association with the Atlanta Constitution.

Harris's work as a columnist led to his creation of Uncle Remus, the black singer of songs and teller of stories. The tales, collected in Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1880), are based upon folklore and are told by the venerable family servant to a little boy on a Georgia plantation. The book's favorable reviews and large sales led to magazine publication of stories later collected in Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), Told by Uncle Remus (1905), and others.

Remus, the old storyteller, is wise, perceptive, imaginative, poetic, and gifted with a sly sense of humor. The stories can be read for the larger picture they give of the exploited blacks who invented them. Their hero, Brer Rabbit, as Harris observed, is "the weakest and most harmless of all animals, " but he is "victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox." Thus "it is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness; it is not malice, but mischievousness." However, since Uncle Remus's casual revelations often picture idyllically the lives of slaves and kindly whites on an ante-bellum plantation, these tales cultivated sympathy for Harris's people and his South. Critics believe that Harris's conscious aim was to end sectional antagonism.

In other fictional works Harris enlarged his portrayal of Southerners to include aristocrats, members of the middle class, mountaineers, and poor white farmers. Genre stories appeared in Mingo and Other Sketches (1884), Free Joe (1887), and other collections. There were two novels: Sister Jane, Her Friends and Acquaintances (1896) and Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of Reconstruction (1902). Harris died on July 3, 1908, in Atlanta.

Further Reading

Harris's On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures during the War (1892), gives an autobiographical account of an important period in his life. Julia C. Harris contributed valuable intimate details in Life and Letters of Joel Chandler Harris (1918) and Joel Chandler Harris as Editor and Essayist (1931). Probably the best biographical and critical account is Paul M. Cousins, Joel Chandler Harris (1968). A useful specialized study is Stella B. Brookes, Joel Chandler Harris, Folklorist (1950).

Additional Sources

Bickley, R. Bruce, Joel Chandler Harris, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

For more information on Joel Chandler Harris, visit Britannica.com.

Harris, Joel Chandler (1848–1908), American author of the Uncle Remus stories. Brought up in rural Georgia, in 1862 he became printer's devil on the Countryman, a plantation newspaper. ‘It was on this and on neighboring plantations that I became familiar with the curious myths and animal stories that form the basis… of Uncle Remus.’ He created the character of Uncle Remus, an elderly ex‐slave, in 1876 in a sketch for the Atlanta Constitution, but the first appearance in that paper of Uncle Remus the storyteller was on 20 July 1879, the idea having been suggested to him by an article, ‘Folklore of the Southern Negroes’, in Lippincott's Magazine of December 1877. The stories about how the cunning and anarchic Brer Rabbit defeats his enemies (and sometimes his friends) were immediately popular; Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings was published in 1880, Nights with Uncle Remus in 1883. Later Uncle Remus stories were directed primarily at children. They are trickster tales, a type common to all folklore, embellished by Harris with elaborate dialogue and set in a framework of idealized plantation life. Though adapted to the Afro‐American experience, it has been shown that over half of the 220 stories retold by Harris originated in Africa.

Bibliography

• Baer, Florence, Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales (1980).
• Bickley, R. Bruce (ed.), Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (1981).
• Hemenway, Robert (ed.), Uncle Remus: His Songs and his Sayings (1982).
• Keenan, Hugh, “‘Joel Chandler Harris' Tales of Uncle Remus: For Mixed Audiences’”, in Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature (1987).
• ‘Rediscovering Uncle Remus Tales’, Teaching and Learning Literature, 5.4 (March–April 1996).
• Montenyohl, Eric L., ‘Joel Chandler Harris and American Folklore’, Atlanta Historical Journal, 30.3–4 (fall–winter 1986–7).

— Gillian Avery

Harris, Joel Chandler, 1848–1908, American short-story writer and humorist, b. Eatonton, Ga., considered one of the greatest American regionalist writers. As an apprentice to the editor of the Countryman, a newspaper published on a Southern plantation, Harris gained firsthand knowledge of black slaves and their folklore. His stories and sketches of the South were originally published in the Atlanta Constitution, with which he was associated from 1876 to 1900. Harris's first collection, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881), brought him immediate fame. Featuring as their narrator a lovable, shrewd former slave, the Uncle Remus stories drew upon African-American folklore and humor and captured the authentic life, character, and dialect of Southern blacks. The demand for his stories and sketches was so great that Harris followed with nine more books in a similar vein, including The Tar Baby (1904) and Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit (1906). In other notable works, such as Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White (1884) and Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887), Harris portrayed with accuracy and insight the aristocrats and poor whites of Georgia.

Bibliography

See his life and letters (ed. by J. C. Harris, 1918); biographies by P. M. Cousins (1968) and R. B. Bickley, Jr. (1987); study by R. B. Bickley, Jr. (1981).

(1848-1908)

1881	Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. Harris issues the first of his many fable collections featuring the former slave Uncle Remus, who entertains his employer's young son with dialect stories from black folklore. Included in the collection are the Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, and Tar-Baby stories. Harris declares his aim in the introduction, stating that "However humorous it may be in effect, its intention is perfectly serious... to preserve the legends themselves in their original simplicity, and to wed them permanently to the quaint dialect." Several sequels would follow, including Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), Mr. Rabbit at Home (1895), The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904), and Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit (1906).
1883	Nights with Uncle Remus. Harris's second series of Uncle Remus stories adds African Jack as a storyteller using the Gullah dialect. The tales in this volume, unlike the first, are set during slavery times, and though they do not overly idealize plantation life, they do portray only an affectionate relationship between slave and master. Harris's subsequent collections would be written more and more explicitly for children.
1884	Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White. The first of Harris's collections without the character Uncle Remus treats Georgia life from the perspective of a faithful African American servant in the title story and through the experiences of backwoodsmen and moonshiners in "At Teague Poteet's."
1887	Free Joe and Other Georgia Sketches. A collection of local-color stories that include "Free Joe and the Rest of the World," about a freed slave unable to find a place in society. It is one of Harris's rare believably realistic portraits of race relations.
1896	Sister Jane: Her Friends and Acquaintances. This is the first of Harris's series of four novels depicting life in Georgia before, during, and after the Civil War. It would be followed by Gabriel Tolliver (1902), A Little Union Scout (1904), and Shadow Between His Shoulder Blades (1909).
1898	Tales of the Home Folks in Peace and War. The first of four volumes of local-color stories that mainly feature romanticized portraits of the Southern gentry. It would be followed by The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899), On the Wings of Occasions (1900), and The Making of a Statesman and Other Stories (1902).
1902	Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of the Reconstruction. Harris attempts a social study of the restlessness and uncertainty of newly freed blacks and the newly impoverished Southerners in the years following the Civil War. He also publishes a collection of local-color short stories, The Making of a Statesman.

Quotes:

"Watch out when you're getting all you want. Fattening hogs ain't in luck."

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