How Joel Chandler Harris Came to Write "Uncle Remus"

1909

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.

The Way He Came to Write His "Uncle Remus" Stories.

Many great works of genius, as is well known, have been produced by accident, and an author is seldom the best judge of his own work. When Joel Chandler Harris wrote the first of his "Uncle Remus" stories and presented it for publication he did so with a hundred misgivings. He was not sure that his venture in negro folklore would prove successful. He could not know that they would bring him worldwide fame.

At the time described Mr. Harris was a young man of twenty-eight, employed on the Atlanta Constitution. Sam W. Small, afterward a revivalist, who had been writing for the same paper a popular column of negro story and dialect, had just resigned from the staff. The managing editor of the Constitution, wishing to continue the feature, said to Harris one day: "Joel, it seems to me you could do that sort of thing to a tee. See if you can't turn in something tonight."

The young writer's memory flitted back to his early days on a plantation. All the quaint settings of negro life — the little cabins, the fiddling darkies, the wrinkled story teller, the black "mammies," the noisy corn shuckings, the bobtailed rabbits disappearing along the road — came hurrying from the past. Late that afternoon he turned in his copy. The next day his reputation was made. — Current Literature.