Nights with Uncle Remus

Joel Chandler Harris (December 9, 1848 July 3, 1908) was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his Uncle Remus stories collection. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he worked as an apprentice on a plantation during his adolescence, and spent the majority of his professional life in Atlanta as an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution. Harris had two professional lives: as Joe Harris, an editor and journalist, he supported a vision of the New South with the editor Henry W. Grady (1880-1889), which emphasized regional and racial reconciliation after Reconstruction; as Joel Chandler Harris, a fiction writer and folklorist, he wrote many 'Brer Rabbit' stories from African-American oral tradition. Joel Chandler Harris was born in 1848 in Eatonton, Georgia, to Irish immigrant Mary Ann Harris. His father, whose name has not been revealed, abandoned Mary Ann shortly after Harris was born. The boy was called Joel after his mother's attending physician, Dr. Joel Branham, who had never married. Chandler was his mother's uncle's name. Harris was always self-conscious about his illegitimate birth.