SOURCE: "The Short Fiction," in Joel Chandler Harris, Twayne Publishers, 1978, pp. 104-29.

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.

I. The Critical Reception of The Short Stories

When Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White appeared in 1884, reviewers were delighted to discover that Harris could write effective local-color and realistic works. But Harris remained so completely identified with his extremely popular Uncle Remus tales that reminders by the critics of his "other mode" continued regularly into the middle of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, when "Free Joe and the Rest of the World" or "Aunt Fountain's Prisoner" began to be included in anthologies of American literature along with...