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 left the paper again, Harris reprised Remus. He realized the literary value of the stories he had heard from the slaves of Turnwold Plantation. Harris set out to record the stories and insisted that they be verified by two independent sources before he would publish them. He found the research more difficult given his professional duties, urban location, race and, eventually, fame. On July 20, 1879, Harris published "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus" in the Atlanta Constitution. It was the first of 34 plantation fables that would be compiled in "Uncle Remus: