Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the illegitimate son of Mary Harris. At 13 Harris became an apprentice printer on The Countryman, a plantation newspaper edited and published by Joseph Addison Turner, a highly literate planter, lawyer and writer. Harris then worked on newspapers in several Southern cities. In 1876 Harris began a twenty-four-year association with the Atlanta Constitution. He used folklore, fiction, dialect and other devices of local color to picture both black and white Georgians under slavery and Reconstruction. Best known as the creator of Uncle Remus, and Remus's creation Brer Rabbit, in other fictional works Harris enlarged his portrayal of Southerners to include aristocrats, members of the middle class, mountaineers and poor white farmers. Harris disowned regionalism in art, saying "My idea is that truth is more important than sectionalism, and that literature that can be labeled Northern, Southern, Western, or Eastern, is not worth labeling at all", yet his writings reflected the region and he was a truly Southern voice in literature.

Author Biography

Joel Chandler Harris (1848 - 1908) was an American journalist, fiction writer and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years. He spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at the Atlanta Constitution. Harris led two professional lives: as the editor and journalist known as Joe Harris, he supported a vision of the New South with the editor Henry W. Grady (1880-1889), stressing regional and racial reconciliation after the Reconstruction era. As Joel Chandler Harris, fiction writer and folklorist, he wrote many 'Brer Rabbit' stories from the African-American oral tradition and helped to revolutionize literature in the process. James Weldon Johnson called the Uncle Remus collection "the greatest body of folklore America has produced."