Description: Working at a plantation in his youth, Joel Chandler Harris found that much of his shyness disappeared in the slave QTLYters, and his background as the illegitimate son of an Irish immigrant helped fuse a close bond with the slaves. The language of his new friends and the African-American animal tales they shared later became the inspiration for Joel's beloved Uncle Remus stories. When Harris recorded the many Brer Rabbit stories from the African-American oral tradition, little did he know that it would revolutionize children's literature. As an adult, Harris committed to healing post-Civil War America, stressing regional and racial reconciliation during and after the Reconstruction era.
Brief description:
Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) collected the folktales of Southern African Americans and retold them as classic stories of Uncle Remus, a fictitious old slave who spun stories to a boy from "the big house of a plantation." He wrote five books featuring Uncle Remus and his stories of Brer Rabbit and friends, and the first, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, was published in 1880.