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Extended Biography

Harris was born in Eatonton on December 9, 1845.  His father, whose identity is uncertain, deserted his young family shortly after Joel's birth. A leading citizen of Eatonton befriended Joel’s mother and provided them a small cabin, and contributed to Joel's education.

Gifted with a strong memory and a love of books, writing skills and a mischievous sense of humor, Harris was hired in March 1862 at age 16 as a printing compositor for Joseph Addison Turner, the owner of 1,000-acre Turnwold Plantation. A country squire of the Thomas Jefferson mold, Turner aimed "to cultivate corn, cotton, and literature." He had installed an old Washington hand press in a building behind the main house and was ready to publish what was probably America's only plantation newspaper, The Countryman.

Harris's four years at Turnwold shaped his career in profound ways. Turner soon obtained a draft exemption for Harris because of his undersized build—and because his work for a paper loyal to the Southern cause aided the war effort.

Harris also had full access to Turnwold's slave quarters and to the kitchen, where he listened to African-American animal stories told by Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy. The people he met and the stories he heard, the literary sensibility he began to cultivate there, and several physical features of the extensive middle Georgia plantation property itself informed Harris's writing.

After holding a variety of journalism posts throughout Georgia and establishing himself through his witty reviews and paragraphs, Harris accepted the position of associate editor at the Savannah Morning News. Harris wrote editorials for the Morning News about compromised morality and "shifty" politicians that revealed the humane and democratic philosophy he espoused throughout his personal and professional life. While he was living at the Florida House (later part of the Marshall House) in Savannah, he courted and fell in love with a fellow resident, French Canadian Esther LaRose. They married in April 1873.

When a deadly yellow fever epidemic hit Savannah in August 1876, the Harris family, which now included two children, moved to higher ground in Atlanta to wait out the epidemic. In September 1876 Atlanta Constitution editor Evan Howell hired the young journalist whose paragraphs he had already been reprinting, and soon named him as associate editor. Harris quickly discovered that Atlanta had become not only the fastest-growing city in the Southeast but also the very center of what Grady, a decade later, famously described as the New South. Harris soon was recognized as one of the country's most important chroniclers of the changing face of the Old South become New.

Harris's Constitution editorials expanded on the social, political, and literary themes he had begun exploring in Forsyth and Savannah—themes he would also treat both directly and indirectly in his folktales and fiction to come.

When he was asked to fill in for absent dialect-writer Sam Small, he invented an engaging African American character named Uncle Remus, who liked dropping by the Constitution offices to share humorous anecdotes and sardonic insights about life on the streets of bustling postwar Atlanta. But an article Harris read on African-American folklore in Lippincott's, which included a transcribed story of "Buh Rabbit and the Tar Baby," reminded him of the Brer Rabbit trickster stories he had heard from the slaves at Turnwold Plantation. His Uncle Remus character now began to tell old plantation folktales, back-home aphorisms, and slave songs, and newspapers around the country eagerly reprinted his rural legends and sayings. Before long, Harris had composed enough material for a book. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings—The Folklore of the Old Plantation was published by Appleton in November 1880. Within four months it had sold 10,000 copies and was quickly reprinted. Harris eventually wrote 185 of the tales.

For the next quarter-century, Harris lived a double life professionally. He was one of two associate editors of the premier newspaper in the Southeast, helping readers interpret the complex New South movement. He was also the creative writer, the "other fellow," as he termed himself: a prolific, committed, and ambitious re-creator of folk stories, a literary comedian, fiction writer, and author of children's books. Harris published 35 books in his lifetime, in addition to writing thousands of articles for the Constitution over a 24-year period.

Harris was a much more ambitious writer than he implied in his typically self-effacing public statements about being "an accidental author." He took his work as a fiction writer seriously, and honed his craft considerably in the course of publishing seven volumes of short stories (in addition to the Uncle Remus tales) and four novels. In his local-color short fiction and novels, Harris explored the lighter and the darker sides of conflicts in race, class, and gender in the South.

The Uncle Remus volumes assured Harris's reputation, which became international almost overnight. Professional folklorists praised his work in popularizing African American storytelling traditions. In 1888 Harris was named a charter member, with Mark Twain, of the American Folklore Society. Before long, in fact, publishing local dialect tales became an international phenomenon: Harris helped spawn a whole industry. The future author of Huckleberry Finn took some of Harris's material on the road with him, and Twain reported later that the tar baby story was always one of his most popular stage-readings.

As voluminous scholarship on these stories confirms, Harris's Uncle Remus volumes are simultaneously adult folktales and children's literature, as the Brer Rabbit trickster tales work on multiple levels. However, Harris's recreation of believable and engaging critters, particularly in his Brer Rabbit tales, virtually revolutionized the modern children's story. Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, Howard Garis's Uncle Wiggly, and A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh—not to mention a whole herd of film and television reincarnations of trickster Brer Rabbit and his gullible adversaries—are all reinventions of Harris's highly animated creatures that talk and behave "de same ez folks."

Harris retired from the Atlanta Constitution in 1900, free at last of what he termed the "newspaper grind" but leaving an influential legacy as a "progressive conservative"—a New South journalist who actively promoted socioeconomic, sectional, and racial reconciliation. In addition to publishing the final volumes of Uncle Remus stories, children's books, and adult fiction, he founded Uncle Remus's Magazine, was honored by President Theodore Roosevelt in Atlanta and at the White House, and was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Harris died on July 3, 1908, of acute nephritis and was buried in Westview Cemetery, West End, Atlanta. Obituary writers were not exaggerating when they eulogized this celebrated middle Georgia writer as "the most beloved man in America." Only Harris's friend and admirer, Mark Twain, who died two years later, surpassed Harris in popular reputation at the beginning of the 20th century. Harris's retelling of the story of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby remains one of the world's best-known folktales, and his complex legacy as a literary comedian, New South journalist, folklorist, fiction writer, and children's author continues to influence modern culture in a surprising number of ways.

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