Uncle Remus

by Joel Chandler Harris

Uncle Remus His songs and sayings with 112 illustration by A. B. Frost.

265 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1915

About the author

Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist born in Eatonton, Georgia who wrote the Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus; His Songs and His Sayings, The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1881 & 1882), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1905).

The stories, based on the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect and in featuring a trickster hero called Br'er ("Brother") Rabbit, who uses his wits against adversity, though his efforts do not always succeed. The frog is the trickster character in traditional tales in Central and Southern Africa. The stories, which began appearing in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879, were popular among both Black and White readers in the North and South, not least because they presented an idealized view of race relations soon after the Civil War. The first published Brer Rabbit stories were written by President Theodore Roosevelt's uncle, Robert Roosevelt.

Reviews

[MarineCAT · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of a fun story with simple illustrations. This is a story about Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox. Very similar to the ACME Looney Toon stories of the coyote and the road runner. They go back and forth trying to out wit each other. One example is that the rabbit tells them to stick their heads in a hole in a laughing tree (kind of weird) and so they do, and a bunch of bees come out. They get back at him by making a tar baby (also weird). The rabbit gets stuck in it, and the events go back and forth. Fun to read, but that is about it.