Joel Chandler Harris Died 100 Years Ago Today
Joel Chandler Harris passed away on July 3, 1908. He was probably 62.
This was the next day’s paper. Somehow I don’t think tomorrow’s headline will read much like it did 100 years ago.
Harris is buried in Westview Cemetery, not too far down the road.
His gravestone reads–
“I seem to see before me the smiling faces of thousands of children some young and fresh and some wearing the friendly marks of age. But all children at heart and not an unfriendly face among them. And while I’m trying hard to speak the right word, I seem to hear a voice lifted above the rest saying you have made some of us happy. And so I feel my heart fluttering and my lips trembling, and I have to bow silently and turn away and hurry back into the obscurity that fits me best.”
Leave a Reply
Amelia Trace Lerner
Program Director
Lain Shakespeare
Executive Director
3 Comments to Joel Chandler Harris Died 100 Years Ago Today
It makes me wonder what if we were all children. It would make for an unbelievingly wonderful world. Children come into this world with a clean slate. They are ready to become completed individuals. Think of the love and all the good that could come into this place we call earth if we remained childlike and made someone smile as we our make our quiet exit from this planet. I wish to salute two friends in the last month that have joined Saint Joel Chandler Harris in that final journey to obscurity (W. Roy Mays, & Tuskegee Airman Lt. Col. Charles W. Dryden).
P.S. It was by public acclamination at our 2004 Legacy in Literature Dinner that Mr. Harris was declared a Saint.
A nice thing to do on a death anniversary is dig the person up for high-tea.
[...] Harris graced the cover of the Atlanta Constitution on July 4th, 1908. The words on Harris’ gravestone at the [...]