SOURCE: "Joel Chandler Harris," in Southern Writers: Biographical and Critical Studies, Volume I, Publishing House M. E. Church, South, 1897, pp. 41-88.

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.

Middle Georgia is the birthplace and home of the raciest and most original kind of Southern humor. In this quarter native material was earliest recognized and first made use of. A school of writers arose who looked out of their eyes and listened with their ears, who took frank interest in things for their own sake, and had enduring astonishment at the most common. They seized the warm and palpitating facts of everyday existence, and gave them to the world with all the accompaniments of quaint...