![]() Harris’s fictionalized storyteller, Uncle Remus, was a “human syndicate” whom he had admittedly “walloped together” from several Black storytellers he had met while working from 1862 to 1866 as a printing compositor on Joseph Addison Turner’s Turnwold Plantation, outside Eatonton, in Putnam County. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, were influenced by Harris’s creation of street-smart, recognizably human animal characters who speak “de same ez folks.” Walt Disney’s pioneering film that first combined live action and animation, Song of the South (1946), Disney World’s Splash Mountain theme ride, an endless array of Saturday morning cartoon tricksters, from Bugs Bunny to the Road Runner, and even B&G Foods’ Brer Rabbit Molasses were born, bred, or otherwise cooked up in Brer Rabbit’s briar patch. Eatonton’s other famous literary personality, however, Alice Walker, only begrudgingly acknowledges Harris’s influence, arguing that he in effect stole a major part of the Black folk legacy from its authentic African American creators.Ī whole gallery of children’s-story heroes, including Kim’s animal friends in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, Howard Garis’s Uncle Wiggily, and A. Writers indebted to Harris include Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Van Dyke Parks and Julius Lester (who have retold the Uncle Remus tales in richly illustrated multivolume sets). The Brer Rabbit stories have been translated into nearly thirty foreign languages and have had an impressively wide influence on writers and on popular culture generally. The remaining stories have their roots in European and Native American folklore. Two-thirds of Harris’s celebrated trickster tales-which constitute the largest gathering of African American folktales published in the nineteenth century-derive their deep structures and primary motifs from African folktales that were brought to the New World and then retold and elaborated upon by enslaved African Americans living in the southeastern United States. Harris, a native of Eatonton, was a literary comedian, New South journalist, amateur folklorist, southern local-color writer, and children’s author. ![]() The Uncle Remus tales are African American trickster stories about the exploits of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and other “creeturs” that were recreated in Black regional dialect by Joel Chandler Harris. ![]()
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