The Story of Miss Moppet sisters, and appears as a character in both books featuring him: "The Tale of Tom Kitten" and "The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding" (1908). Potter was an admirer of American author Joel Chandler Harris and created a series of plates in the 1890s for his Uncle Remus stories, possibly in an attempt to find career direction. So deep was her admiration, Lear speculates the scene of Miss Moppet wrapping her head in the duster comes from a similar scene in an Uncle Remus tale in which Br'er Fox "feigns illness in a rocking chair, wrapped up with
Joel Chandler Harris a problematic and contradictory figure: sometimes a mouthpiece for white paternalism, sometimes a stereotype of the black entertainer, and sometimes poetically subversive. Julius Lester, a black folklorist and university professor, sees the Uncle Remus stories as important records of black folklore. He has rewritten many of the Harris stories in an effort to elevate the subversive elements over the purportedly racist ones. Regarding the nature of the Uncle Remus character, Lester said, There are no inaccuracies in Harris's characterization of Uncle Remus. Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writer's Project of the 1930s