Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the illegitimate son of Mary Harris. At 13 Harris became an apprentice printer on The Countryman. a plantation newspaper edited and published by Joseph Addison Turner, a highly literate planter, lawyer and writer. Harris then worked on newspapers in several Southern cities. In 1876 Harris began a twenty-four-year association with the Atlanta Constitution. He used folklore, fiction, dialect and other devices of local color to picture both black and white Georgians under slavery and Reconstruction.

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) and elsewhere, are based upon folklore and are told by the venerable family servant to a little boy on a Georgia plantation. Remus, the old storyteller, is wise, perceptive, imaginative, poetic and gifted with a sly sense of humor. Their hero, Brer Rabbit, 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."

Author: Joel Chandler Harris
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Aegypan
Published: 01/01/2008
Pages: 152
Weight: 0.51lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.35d
ISBN: 9781603124287
Audience: 01 - 12

About the Author
Harris, Joel Chandler: - "Joel Chandler Harris (1848 - 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 most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at the Atlanta Constitution. Harris led two professional lives: as the editor and journalist known as Joe Harris, he supported a vision of the New South with the editor Henry W. Grady (1880-1889), stressing regional and racial reconciliation after the Reconstruction era. As Joel Chandler Harris, fiction writer and folklorist, he wrote many 'Brer Rabbit' stories from the African-American oral tradition and helped to revolutionize literature in the process. James Weldon Johnson called the Uncle Remus collection the greatest body of folklore America has produced."