Uncle Remus Uncle Remus Uncle Remus is the fictional title character and narrator of a collection of African-American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881. A journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, Georgia, Harris produced seven Uncle Remus books. He wrote these stories to represent the struggle in the Southern United States, and more specifically in the plantations. He did so by introducing tales he had heard and framing them in the plantation context. He wrote his stories in a dialect that represented the voice of the narrators and their subculture. For this choice of framing, his
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