Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1845 – July 3, 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 the majority of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at the Atlanta Constitution.
Harris led two significant professional lives. Editor and journalist Joe Harris ushered in the New South alongside Henry W. Grady, stressing regional and racial reconciliation during the Reconstruction era. Joel Chandler Harris, fiction writer and folklorist, recorded many Brer Rabbit stories from the African-American oral tradition and revolutionized children's literature in the process.
Controversy surrounding his southern plantation themes, narrative structure, collection of African-American folklore, use of dialect, and Uncle Remus character, however, has denigrated the significance of Harris' work, especially during the latter half of the 20th century.
Life
Eatonton: 1845 - 1862
Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia in 1845 to Mary Ann Harris. His father, whose identity remains unknown, abandoned his family shortly after Harris was born. The parents had never married, so Harris took the name Joel from his attending physician, Dr. Joel Branham. Chandler was the name of his mother's uncle. Harris remained self-conscious of his illegitimate birth throughout his life.
A prominent physician, Dr. Andrew Reid, gave the Harris family a small cottage behind his mansion. Mary Harris worked as a seamstress and helped neighbors with their gardening to support herself and her son. She was an avid reader and instilled her son with a love of language: "My desire to write--to give expression to my thoughts--grew out of hearing my mother read The Vicar of Wakefield."
Dr. Reid also paid for Harris' school tuition for several years. In 1856, Joe Harris briefly attended Kate Davidson's School for Boys and Girls, but transfered to Eatonton School for Boys later that year following an undistinguished academic record and a habit of truancy. Harris excelled in reading and writing, but was mostly known for his pranks, mischief, and sense of humor. Practical jokes helped Harris cloak his innate shyness and insecurities about his red hair, Irish ancestry, and illegitimacy, leading to both trouble and a reputation as a leader among the older boys.
Turnwold Plantation: 1862 - 1866
Harris quit school early to help alleviate the financial burden on his mother. In March 1862, Joseph Addison Turner, owner of Turnwold Plantation nine miles east of Eatonton, hired Harris to work as a printer's devil for his newspaper The Countryman. Harris worked for clothing, room, and board. The newspaper reached subscribers throughout the Confederacy during the the Civil War and became one of the larger newspapers in the South with a circulation of about 2,000. Harris learned to set type for the paper, and Turner allowed him to publish his own poems, book reviews, and humorous paragraphs.
Turner's instruction and technical expertise exerted a profound influence on Harris. During his four year tenure at Turnwold Plantation, Joe Harris consumed the literature in Turner's library. He had access to the works of Chaucer, Dickens, and Sir Thomas Browne, as well as to Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Thackeray, and Edgar Allan Poe. Turner, a fiercely independent Southern loyalist and eccentric intellectual, emphasized the work of southern writers, yet stressed that Harris read widely. In The Countryman Turner insisted that Harris not shy away from including humor in his journalism.
While at Turnwold Plantation, Harris spent hundreds of hours in the slave quarters during time off. Much of his self-consciousness disappeared in the slave quarters, and his humble background as an illegitmate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant helped foster an intimate connection with the slaves. He absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of people like Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy. The African-American animal tales they shared later became the foundation and inspiration for Harris' Uncle Remus tales. George Terrell and Old Harbert in particular became models for Uncle Remus as well as role models for Harris.
Savannah and the South: 1866 - 1876
Joseph Addison Turner shut down The Countryman in May 1866. Joe Harris left the plantation with useless Confederate money and very few possessions.
The Macon Telegraph hired Harris as a typesetter later that year. Harris found the work unsatisfactory and himself the butt of jokes around the office, in no small part due to his red hair. Within five months, he accepted a job working for the New Orleans Crescent Monthly, a literary journal. Just six months after that, homesick, he returned to Georgia, but with another opportunity at the Monroe Advertiser, a weekly paper published in Forsyth, Georgia.
At the Advertiser Harris found a regional audience with his column "Affairs of Georgia." Newspapers across the state reprinted his humorous paragraphs and political barbs. Harris' reputation earned him the position of associate editor at the Savannah Morning News, the largest circulation newspaper in Georgia. Though he relished in his position in Forsyth, Joe Harris accepted the $40-a-week job, a significant pay increase, and quickly established himself as Georgia's leading humor columnist while at the Morning News.
In 1872 Harris met Mary Esther LaRose, a seventeen year-old French-Canadian from Quebec. After a year of courtship, Harris and LaRose married in April 1873. LaRose was 18 and Harris, 27 (though publicly admitting to 24). Over the next three years, the couple had two children. Their life in Savannah came to an abrupt halt, however, when they fled to Atlanta to avoid a yellow fever epidemic.
Atlanta: 1876 - 1908
In 1876 Harris accepted a position from Henry W. Grady at the Atlanta Constitution, where he would remain for the next 24 years. Not long after taking the job, Harris began the Uncle Remus stories as a serial to "preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future." The tales were reprinted across the United States, and Harris was approached by publisher D. Appleton and Company to compile them for a book.
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings debuted near the end of 1880. Hundreds of newspapers reviewed the best-seller, and Harris found himself in the national spotlight, albeit reluctantly. Of the press and attention Walter Hines Page noted, "Joe Harris does not appreciate Joel Chandler Harris." Royalties from the book were modest, but allowed Harris to rent a six-room house in West End, an unicorporated village on the outskirts of Atlanta, to accommodate his growing family. Two years later Harris bought the house and hired architect George Humphries to transform the it into a Queen Anne Victorian in the Eastlake style. The home, soon thereafter called The Wren's Nest, would be where Harris spent most of his time.
Harris preferred to write at the Wren's Nest, and would often take the mule-drawn trolley to work, pick up his assignments, and bring them back home. Not only was Harris writing for the Constitution and compiling more stories for Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), but he also contributed local-color stories to magazines like Scribner's, Harper's,and The Century.
Harris published prodigiously throughout the 1880s and 1890s, trying his hand at novels, children's literature, and even a translation of French folklore. Yet he rarely strayed from home and work during this time, choosing to remain close to his family and his gardening. Harris and his wife Essie had six more children in Atlanta, with a total of six (out of nine) surviving past childhood. The oldest, Julian LaRose Harris, won a Pulitzer Prize with his wife Julia Collier Harris in 1926, in part for their "energetic fight" against the Ku Klux Klan.
By the late 1890s, Harris tired of the newspaper grind and suffered from health problems most likely stemming from alcoholism. At the same time, he grew more comfortable with his creative persona. Harris retired from the Constitution in 1900, yet continued experimenting with novels and writing articles for outlets like The Saturday Evening Post. Still, he remained close to home, refusing to accept honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Emory College. In 1905 Harris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Harris did travel to accept an invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. Two years earlier, Roosevelt had said, "Presidents may come and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has done a great many things for the Union, but she has never done more than when she gave Mr. Joel Chandler Harris to American literature."
On July 3, 1908, Joel Chandler Harris died of acute nephritis and complications from cirrhosis of the liver. In his obituary, the New York Times Book Review echoed Roosevelt's sentiment, stating: “Uncle Remus cannot die. Joel Chandler Harris has departed this life at the age of 60 [...] but his best creation, [Uncle Remus] with his fund of folk-lore, will live in literature."
Writing
Folklore
Harris created the first iteration of the Uncle Remus character for the Atlanta Constitution in 1876 after inheriting a column written by Sam W. Small, a colleague who had taken leave from the paper. In these character sketches Remus would visit the newspaper office to discuss the social and racial issues of the day. By 1877 Small had returned to the Constitution and resumed his column.
Harris had no intention to continue the Remus character. But when Small once again left the paper, Harris reprised Remus and this time realized the literary value of the stories of his youth from the slaves of Turnwold Plantation. Harris sought out to record the stories and insisted that they be verified by two independent sources before he would set them into print. The pursuit proved more and more difficult given his professional duties, urban location, race and, eventually, fame.
On July 20, 1879, Harris published "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus" in the Atlanta Constitution. It was the first of 34 plantation fables that would comprise Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings in 1880. The stories, mostly collected directly from the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect, animal personage, and serialized landscape.
Remus' stories featured a trickster hero called Br'er Rabbit ("Brother" Rabbit), who used his wits against adversity, though his efforts did not always succeed. Br'er Rabbit is a direct interpretation of Yoruba tales of Hare, though some others posit Native American influences as well. Scholar Stella Brewer Brookes asserts, "Never has the trickster been better exemplified than in the Br'er Rabbit of Harris." Br'er Rabbit was accompanied by friends and enemies alike, such as Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear, Br'er Terrapin, and Br'er Wolf. The stories represented a significant break from the romantic fairy tales of the Western tradition: instead of a singular event in a singular story, the critters on the plantation existed in an ongoing community saga, time immemorial.
The Uncle Remus stories garnered critical acclaim and achieved popular success well into the 20th century. Harris compiled eight books of Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), and Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905). The tales, 185 in sum, became immensely popular among both black and white readers in the North and South. Few outside of the South had ever heard accents like those spoken in the tales, and no one had ever seen the dialect legitimately and faithfully recorded in print. To the North and those abroad, the stories were a "revelation of the unknown." Mark Twain noted in 1883, "in the matter of writing [the African-American dialect], he is the only master the country has produced."
The stories introduced international readers to the American South. Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to Harris that the tales "ran like wild fire through an English Public school.... [We] found ourselves quoting whole pages of Uncle Remus that had got mixed in with the fabric of the old school life." The Uncle Remus tales have since been translated into more than forty languages.
James Weldon Johnson called the collection "the greatest body of folklore America has produced."
Journalism
Harris' work at the Atlanta Constitution established him as a "progressive conservative" who actively promoted racial reconciliation as well as African-American education, suffrage, and equality. His career was marked by a commitment to the "dissipation of sectional jealousy and misunderstanding, as well as religious and racial intolerance."
Other Works
Harris wrote novels, narrative histories, translations of French folklore, children's literature, and collections of stories depicting rural life in Georgia. The short stories "Free Joe and the Rest of the World", "Mingo", and "At Teague Poteets" are the most influential of his non-Uncle Remus creative work.
Legacy
Harris's legacy has largely been ignored by academia, in no small part due to the Uncle Remus character, use of dialect, plantation setting, and Disney's adaptation of the stories. Despite being the only American children's book to exert a profound influence on storytellers at home and abroad, the Uncle Remus tales effectively have no critical standing.
Harris's legacy is, at the same time, not without considerable controversy: his critical reputation in the 20th and 21st centuries has been wildly mixed.
Criticism
Critic H. L. Mencken held a less than favorable view of Harris: "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." Keith Cartwright, however, asserts, "Harris might arguably be called the greatest single authorial force behind the literary development of African American folk matter and manner."
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 said she learned the story from her family and owed no debt to Harris.
Some scholars are skeptical of the validity of the stories collected by a white man, citing the difficulty that many white folklorists had in persuading African-Americans to divulge their folklore. Other critical scholars cite Uncle Remus as a problematic and contradictory figure: sometimes a mouthpiece for white paternalism, sometimes a stereotype of the black entertainer, and sometimes poetically subversive.
Black folklorist Julius Lester holds a somewhat kinder view of Harris. He sees the Uncle Remus stories as important records of black folklore. He has rewritten many of the Harris stories in an effort to elevate the subversive elements over the purportedly racist ones. Author Ralph Ellison also responded to Harris' work positively: "Aesop and Uncle Remus had taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction; and especially when it allows us to glimpse the animal instincts lying beneath the surface of our civilized affectations."
Influence
Children's literature analyst John Goldthwaite considers the Uncle Remus tales "irrefutably the central event in the making of modern children's story." Harris' influence on children's writers like Kipling, Milne, Potter, and Burgess can hardly be overstated. Before Uncle Remus, there was nothing else like the stories in Western literature for children or adults.
Song of the South
In 1946, the Walt Disney Company produced a film based on the Uncle Remus tales called Song of the South. While commercially successful during its original release and re-releases, the film has never been released for home consumption in the United States. Song of the South has been released on video in a number of countries outside the US, and on laserdisk in Japan.
The film garnered mixed critical reviews and a two Academy Awards. James Baskett won an honorary Academy Award for his portrayal of Uncle Remus, and Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah was presented with the award for Best Original Song. The NAACP acknowledged "the remarkable artistic merit" of the film, but decried the "impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship."
Since its debut, the public perception of Harris and the Uncle Remus stories has largely been tied to the reception of Song of the South.
Landmarks
The Wren's Nest, Harris's home in Atlanta, Georgia, is a National Historic Landmark and has operated as a museum home since 1913. The Uncle Remus Museum, in Eatonton, GA, also commemorates the life of Harris. A state historic landmark plaque sits on Bay Street in Savannah, GA across from the now demolished Savannah Morning News building.
Selected List of Works
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880)
Nights with Uncle Remus (1883)
Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White (1884)
Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887)
Daddy Jake, The Runaway: And Short Stories Told After Dark (1889)
Joel Chandler Harris' Life of Henry W. Grady (1890)
On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy's Adventures During the War (1892)
Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892)
The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899)
Told By Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905)
Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907)
Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910)
Uncle Remus Returns (1918)
Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948)
Translation
The phrase "Joel Chandler Harris" occurs as such in the following languages: English, German, Polish, Romanian.
Translation(s) in other languages: Georgian: ჯოელ ჩენდლერ ჰარისი, Japanese: ジョーエル・チャンドラー・ハリス, Russian: Харрис, Джоэль Чандлер.
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