Br'er Rabbit aunt from the State of Georgia, that "She knew all the 'Br'er Rabbit' stories, and I was brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in "Harper's", where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose who, in 'Uncle Remus', made the stories immortal." These stories were popularized for the mainstream audience in the late 19th century by Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908), who wrote down and published many such stories that had been passed down by oral tradition. Harris
Uncle Remus recorded have direct equivalents in the African oral tradition. Harris himself said, in the introduction to "Uncle Remus", that he hoped his book would be considered: ... a sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe's [author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"] wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him. Mark Twain read the Uncle Remus stories to his children, who were awed to meet Harris himself. In his "Autobiography"