Eatonton: 1845 - 1862

Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia in 1845 to Mary Ann Harris. His father, whose identity remains unknown, abandoned his family shortly after Harris was born. The parents had never married, so Harris took the name Joel from his attending physician, Dr. Joel Branham. Chandler was the name of his mother's uncle. Harris remained self-conscious of his illegitimate birth throughout his life.

A prominent physician, Dr. Andrew Reid, gave the Harris family a small cottage behind his mansion. Mary Harris worked as a seamstress and helped neighbors with their gardening to support herself and her son. She was an avid reader and instilled her son with a love of language: "My desire to write--to give expression to my thoughts--grew out of hearing my mother read The Vicar of Wakefield."

Dr. Reid also paid for Harris' school tuition for several years. In 1856, Joe Harris briefly attended Kate Davidson's School for Boys and Girls, but transferred to Eatonton School for Boys later that year following an undistinguished academic record and a habit of truancy. Harris excelled in reading and writing, but was mostly known for his pranks, mischief, and sense of humor. Practical jokes helped Harris cloak his innate shyness and insecurities about his red hair, Irish ancestry, and illegitimacy, leading to both trouble and a reputation as a leader among the older boys.

Turnwold Plantation: 1862 - 1866

Harris quit school early to help alleviate the financial burden on his mother. In March 1862, Joseph Addison Turner, owner of Turnwold Plantation nine miles east of Eatonton, hired Harris to work as a printer's devil for his newspaper The Countryman. Harris worked for clothing, room, and board. The newspaper reached subscribers throughout the Confederacy during the American Civil War and became one of the larger newspapers in the South with a circulation of about 2,000. Harris learned to set type for the paper, and Turner allowed him to publish his own poems, book reviews, and humorous paragraphs.

Turner's instruction and technical expertise exerted a profound influence on Harris. During his four year tenure at Turnwold Plantation, Joe Harris consumed the literature in Turner's library. He had access to the works of Chaucer, Dickens, and Sir Thomas Browne, as well as to Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Thackeray, and Edgar Allan Poe. Turner, a fiercely independent Southern loyalist and eccentric intellectual, emphasized the work of southern writers, yet stressed that Harris read widely. In The Countryman Turner insisted that Harris not shy away from including humor in his journalism.

While at Turnwold Plantation, Harris spent hundreds of hours in the slave quarters during time off. Much of his self-consciousness disappeared in the slave quarters, and his humble background as an illegitimate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant helped foster an intimate connection with the slaves. He absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of people like Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy. The African-American animal tales they shared later became the foundation and inspiration for Harris' Uncle Remus tales. George Terrell and Old Harbert in particular became models for Uncle Remus as well as role models for Harris.

Savannah and the South: 1866 - 1876

Joseph Addison Turner shut down The Countryman in May 1866. Joe Harris left the plantation with useless Confederate money and very few possessions.

The Macon Telegraph hired Harris as a typesetter later that year. Harris found the work unsatisfactory and himself the butt of jokes around the office, in no small part due to his red hair. Within five months, he accepted a job working for the New Orleans Crescent Monthly, a literary journal. Just six months after that, homesick, he returned to Georgia, but with another opportunity at the Monroe Advertiser, a weekly paper published in Forsyth, Georgia.

At the Advertiser Harris found a regional audience with his column "Affairs of Georgia." Newspapers across the state reprinted his humorous paragraphs and political barbs. Harris' reputation earned him the position of associate editor at the Savannah Morning News, the largest circulation newspaper in Georgia. Though he relished in his position in Forsyth, Joe Harris accepted the $40-a-week job, a significant pay increase, and quickly established himself as Georgia's leading humor columnist while at the Morning News.

In 1872 Harris met Mary Esther LaRose, a seventeen year-old French-Canadian from Quebec. After a year of courtship, Harris and LaRose married in April 1873. LaRose was 18 and Harris, 27 (though publicly admitting to 24). Over the next three years, the couple had two children. Their life in Savannah came to an abrupt halt, however, when they fled to Atlanta to avoid a yellow fever epidemic.

Atlanta: 1876 - 1908

In 1876 Harris accepted a position from Henry W. Grady at the Atlanta Constitution, where he would remain for the next 24 years, most of that time in association with other writers including Frank Lebby Stanton who was in turn an associate of James Whitcomb Riley. Not long after taking the job, Harris began the Uncle Remus stories as a serial to "preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future." The tales were reprinted across the United States, and Harris was approached by publisher D. Appleton and Company to compile them for a book.

His Songs and His Sayings debuted near the end of 1880. Hundreds of newspapers reviewed the best-seller, and Harris found himself in the national spotlight, albeit reluctantly. Of the press and attention Walter Hines Page noted, "Joe Harris does not appreciate Joel Chandler Harris."Royalties from the book were modest, but allowed Harris to rent a six-room house in West End, an unicorporated village on the outskirts of Atlanta, to accommodate his growing family. Two years later Harris bought the house and hired architect George Humphries to transform the farmhouse into a Queen Anne Victorian in the Eastlake style. The home, soon thereafter called The Wren's Nest, would be where Harris spent most of his time.

Harris preferred to write at the Wren's Nest, and would often take the mule-drawn trolley to work, pick up his assignments, and bring them back home. Not only was Harris writing for the Constitution and compiling more stories for Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), but he also contributed local-color stories to magazines like Scribner's, Harper's,and The Century.

Harris published prodigiously throughout the 1880s and 1890s, trying his hand at novels, children's literature, and even a translation of French folklore. Yet he rarely strayed from home and work during this time, choosing to remain close to his family and his gardening. Harris and his wife Essie had six more children in Atlanta, with a total of six (out of nine) surviving past childhood. The oldest, Julian LaRose Harris, won a Pulitzer Prize with his wife Julia Collier Harris in 1926, in part for their "energetic fight" against the Ku Klux Klan.

By the late 1890s, Harris tired of the newspaper grind and suffered from health problems most likely stemming from alcoholism. At the same time, he grew more comfortable with his creative persona. Harris retired from the Constitution in 1900, yet continued experimenting with novels and writing articles for outlets like The Saturday Evening Post. Still, he remained close to home, refusing to accept honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Emory College. In 1905 Harris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Harris did travel to accept an invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had said, "Presidents may come and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has done a great many things for the Union, but she has never done more than when she gave Mr. Joel Chandler Harris to American literature."

On July 3, 1908, Joel Chandler Harris died of acute nephritis and complications from cirrhosis of the liver. In his obituary, the New York Times Book Review echoed Roosevelt's sentiment, stating: “Uncle Remus cannot die. Joel Chandler Harris has departed this life at the age of 60 [...] but his best creation, [Uncle Remus] with his fund of folk-lore, will live in literature."

Folklore

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 published at least twenty-nine books, of which nine books were compiled of Uncle Remus stories, including His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904), New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905), Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907). The last three books written by Joel Chandler Harris were published after his death which included Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910), Uncle Remus Returns (1918), and Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948). 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. 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.

Harris's legacy has largely been ignored by academia, in no small part due to the Uncle Remus character, use of dialect, plantation setting, and Disney's adaptation of the stories. Harris's books exerted a profound influence on on storytellers at home and abroad, yet the Uncle Remus tales effectively have no critical standing. His legacy is, at the same time, not without considerable controversy: Harris' critical reputation in the 20th and 21st centuries has been wildly mixed.

Criticism

Critic H. L. Mencken held a less than favorable view of Harris: "Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank." Keith Cartwright, however, asserts, "Harris might arguably be called the greatest single authorial force behind the literary development of African American folk matter and manner."

Alice Walker accused Harris of "stealing a good part of my heritage" in a searing essay called "Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine". Toni Morrison wrote a novel called Tar Baby based on the folktale recorded by Harris. In interviews, she said she learned the story from her family and owed no debt to Harris.

Some scholars are skeptical of the validity of the stories collected by a white man, citing the difficulty that many white folklorists had in persuading African-Americans to divulge their folklore. Other critical scholars cite Uncle Remus as a problematic and contradictory figure: sometimes a mouthpiece for white paternalism, sometimes a stereotype of the black entertainer, and sometimes poetically subversive.

Black folklorist Julius Lester sees the Uncle Remus stories as important records of black folklore. He has rewritten many of the Harris stories in an effort to elevate the subversive elements over the purportedly racist ones. Author Ralph Ellison also responded to Harris' work positively: "Aesop and Uncle Remus had taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction; and especially when it allows us to glimpse the animal instincts lying beneath the surface of our civilized affectations."

Some 21st century scholars have argued that the Uncle Remus tales satirized the very "plantation school" that readers believed his work supported. Critic Robert Cochran noted: "Harris went to the world as the trickster Brer Rabbit, and in the trickster Uncle Remus he projected both his sharpest critique of things as they were and the deepest image of his heart’s desire." Harris omitted the Southern plantation house, disparaged the white Southern gentleman, and presented miscegenation in positive terms. He violated social codes and presented an ethos that would have otherwise shocked his reading audience. These recent acknowledgements echo early observations from Walter Hines Page who wrote in 1884 that Harris "hardly conceals his scorn for the old aristocracy" and makes a "a sly thrust at the pompous life of the Old South."

Influence

Children's literature analyst John Goldthwaite argues that the Uncle Remus tales are "irrefutably the central event in the making of modern children's story." Harris' influence on children's writers like Kipling, Milne, Potter, Burgess and Blyton is substantial. His influence on modernism is less overt, but also evident in the works of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Faulkner.

Beatrix Potter illustrated eight scenes from the Uncle Remus stories between 1893 and 1896, coinciding with the first drawings of Peter Rabbit. Potter's family had favored the Uncle Remus stories during her youth, and she was particularly impressed by the way Harris turned "the ordinary into the extraordinary." Potter borrowed some of the language from the Uncle Remus stories, adopting vocabulary like "cottontail," "puddle-duck," and "lippity-(c)lippity" into her own work.

Mark Twain incorporated several of the Uncle Remus stories into his book tour. He wrote to William Dean Howells in the early 1880s, reporting that the "Tar Baby" had been received "best of all" at a reading in Hartford. Twain admired Harris' use of dialect, and generously appropriated exchanges and turns of phrase in many of his works, most notably in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Mysterious Stranger.

A.A. Milne borrowed diction, plot, and narrative structure from several Brer Rabbit stories. "Pooh Goes Visiting" and "Heyo, House!" are particularly similar. As a boy Milne recalled listening to his father read one Uncle Remus story per night, and referred to it as "the sacred book."

Charles Chesnutt's most famous work, The Conjure Woman is heavily influenced by the Uncle Remus Tales, featuring Uncle Julius as the main character and storyteller. Chesnutt read the Uncle Remus stories to his own children.

Many scholars cite Harris' influence on William Faulkner, most importantly in terms of dialect usage, depictions of African-Americans and lower-class whites, and fictionalized landscape.

Poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot corresponded in Uncle Remus inspired dialect, referring to themselves as "Brer Rabbit" and "Old Possum," respectively. Eventually the dialect and the personae became a sign of their collaboration against the London literary establishment. Eliot even titled one of his books Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

Song of the South

In 1946, the Walt Disney Company produced a film based on the Uncle Remus tales called Song of the South. While commercially successful during its original release and re-releases, the film has never been released for home consumption in the United States. Song of the South has been released on video in a number of overseas markets, and on laserdisk in Japan.

The film gained mixed critical reviews and two Academy Awards. James Baskett won an honorary Academy Award for his portrayal of Uncle Remus, and "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" was presented with the award for Best Original Song. The NAACP acknowledged "the remarkable artistic merit" of the film, but decried the "impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship."

Since its debut, the public perception of Harris and the Uncle Remus stories has largely been tied to the reception of Song of the South.

Landmarks

The Wren's Nest, Harris's home in Atlanta, Georgia, is a National Historic Landmark and has operated as a museum home since 1913. The Uncle Remus Museum, in Eatonton, GA, also commemorates the life of Harris. A state historic landmark plaque sits on Bay Street in Savannah, GA across from the now demolished Savannah Morning News building.