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...

In 1882, according to Mark Twain, a group of children who were invited to the New Orleans home of George Washington Cable to meet the newly famous author of "Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby" were doubly disappointed. Not only was Joel Chandler Harris too...

Joel Chandler Harris , better known today as the talented Georgian folklorist and creator of Uncle Remus who recounted numerous tales of plantation life, was first and foremost a newspaper journalist. It has not been unusual for literary figures to...

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS. As one of the foremost Harris scholarsin the country, Bickley is intimately acquainted with paradoxes and inner tensions that beset Harris throughout his public career, but those themes are muted or deflected in this succinct critical biography. Originally published...

The Other Fellow "Presidents may come andpresidents may go," Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed at a 1905 Atlanta banquet attended by Joel Chandler Harris, "but Uncle Remus stays put." Roosevelt's tribute was eloquent testimony to the popularity at the turn of the century of...

There’s a letter from Stepin Fetchit in the John Ford papers at the Lilly Library. It’s handwritten, articulate, dignified, very desperate. He’s not asking for a handout, he’s asking for a job. The letter dates from the early 1950’s, when the shiftless, shuffling part that...

There’s a letter from Stepin Fetchit in the John Ford papers at the Lilly Library. It’s handwritten, articulate, dignified, very desperate. He’s not asking for a handout, he’s asking for a job. The letter dates from the early 1950’s, when the shiftless, shuffling part that...

An American educator and critic, Bickley is the author of Joel Chandler Harris (1978) and Joel Chandler Harris: A Reference Guide (1978) and the editor of Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (1978). In the following excerpt, he surveys Harris's realistic short stories, published in collections between 1884 and 1902.

In the following essay, which is usually considered the first substantial biographical and critical study of Harris, Baskerville provides a general appreciation of the author, whom he deems "the most sympathetic, the most original, the truest delineator" of African American life.

An American educator and critic, Bone is the author of The Negro Novel in America (1958) and Richard Wright (1969). In the following excerpt, he asserts that African American tales exemplified by Harris's Uncle Remus stories embody "the black slave's resistance to white power."