The first of the five reputations that Joel Chandler Harris earned was as a comic "paragrapher" for Georgia newspapers. Reviewers and critics from his time to ours have observed, however, that Harris's Middle Georgia sense of humor was present in all the other phases of his career as well: as in influential editor of the Atlanta Constitution, as the recreator of a major body of Afro-American folklore, as an important Southern local colorist, and as a writer of children's books. In 1881, while enthusiastic reviews of the "irresistible humor" of Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) continued to pile up in the Constitution's mail room, Harris protested to the North Carolina editor Walter Hines Page that he did not want to be tagged a "humorist." Harris was not protesting too much, for he was certainly more than a gifted literary comedian--although less accomplished than another regional humorist...