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
Uncle Remus recorded have direct equivalents in the African oral tradition. Harris himself said, in the introduction to "Uncle Remus", that he hoped his book would be considered: ... a sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe's [author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"] wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him. Mark Twain read the Uncle Remus stories to his children, who were awed to meet Harris himself. In his "Autobiography"