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
Joel Chandler Harris the Uncle Remus stories, adopting the words: "cottontail," "puddle-duck," and "lippity-(c)lippity" into her own work. Mark Twain incorporated several of the Uncle Remus stories into readings during his book tour. He wrote to William Dean Howells in the early 1880s, reporting that the "Tar Baby" had been received "best of all" at a reading in Hartford. Twain admired Harris' use of dialect. He appropriated exchanges and turns of phrase in many of his works, most notably in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Mysterious Stranger". A.A. Milne borrowed diction, plot, and narrative structure from several Brer Rabbit stories. "Pooh Goes