Joel Chandler Harris

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Harris at his West End home

Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1848 - July 3, 1908) was an American journalist born in Eatonton, Georgia who wrote the Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus; His Songs and His Sayings. The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation. (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1881 & 1882), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1905).

The stories, based on the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect and in featuring a trickster hero called Br'er ("Brother") Rabbit, who uses his wits against adversity, though his efforts do not always succeed. The rabbit is the trickster character in traditional tales in Central and Southern Africa. The stories, which began appearing in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879, were popular among both Black and White readers in the North and South, not least because they presented an idealized view of race relations soon after the Civil War. The first published Brer Rabbit stories were written by President Theodore Roosevelt's uncle, Robert Roosevelt.

Paul Reuben wrote, “Joel Chandler Harris was a white man, born of poor parents, who at thirteen left home and became an apprentice to Joseph Addison Turner, a newspaper publisher and plantation owner. It is at this plantation, Turnwold, that Harris first heard the black folktales that were to make him famous.” In Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson describes Harris as a “painfully shy newsman” who had a pronounced stammer and was very self-conscious about his illegitimate birth.

H. L. Mencken held a less than favorable view of Harris. He wrote: "Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks--that his works were really the products, not of white Georgia, but of black Georgia. Writing afterward as a white man, he swiftly subsided into the fifth rank." [from The Sahara of the Bozart]

Among Black American writers, Harris is a highly polarizing figure. Alice Walker accused Harris of "stealing a good part of my heritage" in a searing essay called "Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine." Toni Morrison wrote a novel called "Tar Baby" based on the folktale recorded by Harris. In interviews, she has claimed she learned the story from family, and owes no debt to Harris. Black folklorist Julius Lester holds a somewhat kinder view of Harris. He sees the Uncle Remus stories as important records of Black Folklore, and has rewritten many of the Harris' stories in an effort to elevate the subversive elements over the racist ones.

Apart from Uncle Remus, Harris wrote several other collections of stories depicting rural life in Georgia.

In 1946, the Walt Disney Company produced a film based on Harris's work, called Song of the South. While critically and commercially successful during its original release and re-releases, the fear of controversy has kept the film from North American release on home video.