by Joel Chandler Harris

Joel Chandler Harris was born on December 9, 1848, in Putnam County, Georgia. As a young white man, he became apprenticed to a printer on the Turnwold plantation. He felt comfortable among the plantation slaves and spent much of his spare time in the slave quarters. Harris believed that it was ethnologically important to record their verbal art and speech patterns. With the publication of Uncle Remus, he established himself as one of the earliest collectors of plantation dialect and folklore.

Events in History at the Time of the Collection

The collecting of folklore. The active collecting of folklore and development of compilations such as Uncle Remus became common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was a feeling that folklore from previous times was in danger of dying out, just as...