The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies sequels are the best known and most successful of Potter's books. The author had an affinity for rabbits; she lived with them as pets and observed them closely for years. Though she once wrote that rabbits were creatures of "warm volatile temperaments" and were "shallow and extremely transparent", she invested her rabbits with a variety of characterizations consistent with the nature of the animal. All the rabbit tales were inspired in part by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, which Potter began illustrating as early as 1893 in an attempt to find career direction and probably because they featured a
George Remus River from Cincinnati) where he lived out the next twenty years of his life modestly without incident. He married for a third and final time to his long time secretary Blanche Watson. Remus ran a small contracting firm, Washington Contracting, until he suffered a stroke in August 1950. For the next two years, he lived in boarding house in Covington under the care of a nurse. Remus died on January 20, 1952 at the age of 77. He is buried beside his third wife at Riverside Cemetery in Falmouth, Kentucky. Remus is the subject of Craig Holden’s, "The Jazz Bird