SOURCE: A review of Free Joe, and Other Georgian Sketches, in The Nation, Vol. 46, No. 1183, March 1, 1888, pp. 182-83.

In the following review, the critic notes that the stories in Free Joe, and Other Georgian Sketches are realistic yet beautiful.

Mr. Harris's stories bound together under the title Free Joe depict the life and characters with which he has already made us familiar. The Georgian negro, bond and free, the poor white, and the mountaineer are given enduring life by his pen. It may be heresy to suggest it, but one feels that his portraits of the Southern aristocrat, as he was before the war, are no less truthful. The rich young slaveowners with rather provincial tongue, views, and clothes, who rejoiced to sit by the hour in the corner grocery with their heels in the air, have a startling semblance of reality. The war undoubtedly deprived them of...