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Joel Chandler Harris was a successful journalist who gained national attention when he published a series of plantation stories told by the fictional slave Uncle Remus about the trickster Br’er Rabbit.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
Growing up in Poverty
Joel Chandler Harris was born December 9, 1848, near Eatonton, Georgia. The illegitimate son of an Irish day-laborer, Harris was perpetually embarrassed by his family situation and his appearance (he was a shocking redhead), twin insecurities that eventually resulted in chronic shyness. Several of Harris’s biographers note that he developed his particular sense of humor in the attempt to overcome this shyness.
First Job as a Typesetter’s Apprentice
At age thirteen Harris went to work as a typesetter’s apprentice to Joseph Addison Turner, editor and publisher of the weekly Countryman. Harris soon discovered that he and Turner shared a common sense of humor. As he took on greater responsibility with the Countryman, Harris was given the opportunity to write for print.
In 1864, near the close of the American Civil War, a detachment of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Federal troops ransacked Turnwold. Turner’s finances shrank significantly as a result of the war, and in 1866 the publication of the Countryman was halted. Harris moved to Macon to take a job as a typesetter with the Telegraph.
Along with his newly developed maturity, Harris took away memories of plantation life that provided the foundation for his career as a journalist and author.
Harris worked variously as a typesetter and book reviewer in Georgia and Louisiana until 1867, when he accepted an editorial position with the Monroe Advertiser in Forsyth, Georgia. Harris spent three satisfying years as a staff writer with the paper, then took an associate editor’s position with the Savannah Morning News.
Uncle Remus is Born
Harris had a daily column in Savannah—”Affairs in Georgia”—which provided readers with a dose of pointed observation, local color, and humor. Harris quickly gained a regular following. He was, in fact, second only to his contemporary Mark Twain in reputation as a Southern humorist. Following a local outbreak of yellow fever in 1876, Harris left Savannah for Atlanta, where he took a position with the Constitution, where he would remain for ten years. At the request of his editor- in-chief, Evan P. Howell, Harris published a series of sketches done in African-American dialect, a homespun interpretation of the speech of plantation slaves. The sketches were immediately hailed as the most accurate and entertaining tales of their type.
It was not until 1879 that these sketches featured Uncle Remus, the character who propelled Harris to literary fame. With Uncle Remus as his mouthpiece, Harris recounted all the slave legends and folktales he had absorbed as a young man. Harris’s admirers found a compelling air of authenticity in the narrative voice of Uncle Remus; to many, he was a portrait of life before the war. The first collection of Uncle Remus stories, Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: Folklore of the Old Plantation (1880) consisted mostly of animal tales focused on the crafty, nearly sinister deeds of Br’er Rabbit. It was immensely popular and gained the attention of folklorists and philologists.
Success of the Remus Stories
Following his first book in 1880, Harris published four more in the next ten years, including his second collection of Remus stories, Nights With Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (1883). By this time he had read deeply on the literature of folklore and introduced this volume with a thirty-one-page discussion of the origin of his stories.
By 1890 Harris was acclaimed as America’s most accomplished dialect writer, and his literary popularity was assured. Throughout the decade of the 1890s he maintained a prolific pace that resulted in twelve more volumes, including one Uncle Remus collection, Uncle Remus and His Friends: Old Plantation Stories, Songs, and Ballads with Sketches of Negro Character (1892). During this period Harris also produced adult fiction, an autobiography, juvenile fiction, and regional tales. Near the end of the decade Harris introduced a female counterpart to Remus in The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899).
Retirement from the Atlanta Constitution
In 1900, Harris retired from the Atlanta Constitution and signed a new publishing contract that allowed him to devote his full energies to his stories and his large family. In that year he published On the Wing of Occasions (1900), his first collection of ”Billy Sanders” stories. Sanders, a young middle-class Georgian with a good deal of homespun philosophy, first appeared as a Confederate Army private in a Saturday Evening Post serial. Three more Billy Sanders volumes appeared in the next decade. The Billy Sanders stories did not receive the acclaim the Remus yarns had achieved, but they were generally popular and kept Harris’s name before the public.
A Difficulty in Writing Novels
From as early as 1878, when he had serialized ”The Romance of Rockville” in the weekly edition of the Constitution, Harris had been frustrated with his efforts to write a novel. In 1896 he produced Sister Jane: Her Friends and Acquaintances but recognized deficiencies in the book. Sister Jane offered interesting and accurate glimpses of small-town life in Middle Georgia, but as a novel it was plodding and improbable, as critics were not hesitant to point out. Now, near the end of his career, he tried again with Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of Reconstruction (1902). Criticism was mixed, but the book does provide a characterization of the lives of both whites and blacks in the Reconstruction period.
A Little Union Scout (1904) was published following serialization in the February and March issues of the Saturday Evening Post. Some critics considered the short novel chronicling the adventures of two young Confederates and an African American slave as one of Harris’s most imaginative works, and popular reaction was enthusiastic. Then, after a hiatus of twelve years, there followed three new Uncle Remus volumes: The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904), Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905), and Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit (1907). The new stories suggest Harris was unhappy with the direction the New South was taking, and public reaction to these volumes was less than enthusiastic.
By 1905, Harris was at the height of his literary reputation. In May of that year he was named a charter member— one among twenty—of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, joining such luminaries as Mark Twain, Henry Adams, and Henry James. In October, President Theodore Roosevelt visited Atlanta and publicly acclaimed the author as one of Georgia’s foremost citizens.
Uncle Remus’s Magazine
At age fifty-seven, Harris embarked on a new literary venture. On June 1907, after more than a year of preparation, Uncle Remus’s Magazine made its debut, with Harris as its editor. The publication preached a cheerful philosophy and practiced tolerance in all matters. Its motto—”Typical of the South-National in Scope”—suggested it offered to the whole nation those Southern qualities of sentiment and affection in which Harris took such pride. At the end of the magazine’s first year Harris wrote that it ”has had a success far beyond the hopes of those engaged in producing it.”
In May 1908 Uncle Remus’s Magazine absorbed the Home Magazine, published by Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis. Combined circulation was said to be 200,000. Harris was overtaxed by the responsibilities of editing the magazine; he wrote much of its content and received a never-ending flow of visitors, and his health began to fail early in 1908. Doctors described his illness as acute nephritis and cirrhosis of the liver. In June he was confined to his bed, where he died on July 3, 1908.
Works in Literary Context
In his own day, Harris was one of America’s most popular authors, known throughout the world for his humorous folktales about African American life told through the dialect of kindly old Uncle Remus. His writing was influenced by his experiences living and working on the Turnwold plantation.
Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
The modern reader may have difficulty appreciating the Uncle Remus tales. The dialect requires concentration and the humor is less than obvious to residents of a different era. At the turn of the century, however, as a nation only recently at war with itself tried to turn its back on sectional differences, Harris’s romance of the old plantation, his fiction of kind masters and appreciative slaves, and his apparent affirmation of African American simplicity and white superiority (which on a close second look was no affirmation at all) were all balms for still-festering wounds.
Harris arranged the tales as follows: Uncle Remus is bound in service to a young white boy, to whom he relates all the fictions, myths, and legends he absorbed as a slave. Br’er Rabbit is the protagonist of the majority of these tales. Faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, Br’er Rabbit unfailingly resorts to wit, and in several cases homicide, to overcome his antagonists.
More than a hundred years after the publication of the first Uncle Remus tales, the stories are still widely read and enjoyed. Some critics argue that, despite his social and political agenda, Harris provided the African-American community an invaluable service by recording tales that may have otherwise been lost to history. Recent African-American authors, however, have reclaimed this body of folklore and presented it without the dialect treatment or mediation of Uncle Remus.
Works in Critical Context
As a journalist and author of fiction, Harris enjoyed immense success and popularity during his lifetime. In fact, many critics ranked him second only to Mark Twain as the best Southern humorist. Among his published works, his tales of Uncle Remus drew the most critical acclaim.
Popularity of Uncle Remus
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings was an immediate success; ten thousand copies were sold in the first four months and critical reviews were overwhelmingly favorable. ”Mr. Harris’s book is altogether excellent of its kind,” a New York Times (December 1, 1880) reviewer wrote, ”and in preserving certain quaint legends and giving us exactly the sounds of the negro dialect, he has established on a firm basis the first real book of American folk lore.” Harris’s contemporary, the critic William Malone Baskervill, quoting an unspecified source in his Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical Studies (1896), noted that ”’Uncle Remus’… belong[s] to the class of [literature] which ‘has nothing but pleasant memories of slavery, and which has all the prejudices of caste and pride of family that were the natural results of the system.”’
Contemporary Perspectives on Uncle Remus Many critics concur that the latent racism of the Uncle Remus tales continues to bedevil Harris’s work. In fact, the merit of Uncle Remus as children’s literature has been called into question on several occasions because of its racist assumptions. Harris himself believed that slavery had been beneficial to African-Americans, and had helped to lift them from a state of savagery toward Christianity and American citizenship.
- Bickley, Jr., R. Bruce, ed. Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.
- Bone, Robert. Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Putnam’s, 1975.
- Brash, Walter. Br’er Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the ”Cornfield Journalist”: The Tale of Joel Chandler
- Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000.
- Brookes, Stella Brewer. Joel Chandler Harris—Folklorist. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1950.
- Cousins, Paul M. Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.
- Harlow, Alvin P. Joel Chandler Harris: Plantation Storyteller. New York: Messner, 1941. Harris, Julia Collier. The Life and Letters of Joel Chandler
- Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1918.
- Lee, Walter Wideman. Joel Chandler Harris. New York: The Century Company, 1909.
- Wiggins, Robert Lemuel. The Life of Joel Chandler Harris, from Obscurity in Boyhood to Fame in Early Manhood. Nashville, Tenn.: Publishing House Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1918.
- Cochran, R. ”Black Father: The Subversive Achievement of Joel Chandler Harris.” African American Review 38 (2004): 21-34.
- Strickland, William Bradley. ”A Check List of the Periodical Contributions of Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908).” American Literary Realism 9 (Summer 1976): 207-209.
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