Ambrose Bierce (1842 - c.1913) was an American satiric writer most famous for his short
story, “An Occurrence at Owl Street Bridge,” and his mock reference book The Devil’s
Dictionary, which was first published as a column in 1881 and appeared in irregular
installments in magazines and newspapers over the course of thirty years. A veteran
of the Civil War, Bierce’s military service and combat experience informed much of
his work. Bierce disappeared in 1913 while traveling with rebel troops during the
Mexican Revolution and the circumstances of his death remain a mystery.
George Washington Cable (1844 - 1925) was an American journalist and novelist, a native of
Louisiana and known for his portrayal of Creole life in his fiction. Cable served in
the Confederate Army during the Civil War. His later support for civil rights and
his outspoken criticism of the racism of Creole culture, especially in his 1880
novel The Grandissimes and his depiction of the legacy of racism in The Silent South
in 1885 garnered resentment from Southern readers, eventually driving him to
relocate to Massachusetts.
Andrew Carnegie (1835 - 1919), American industrialist, entrepreneur and philanthropist,
earned his fortune in the steel industry. He is celebrated for his success in
helping bring about the triumph of industrial capitalism at the turn of the
twentieth century. A friend and admirer of Harris, Carnegie visited Harris at the
Wren’s Nest in 1906. Carnegie helped fund Uncle Remus’s Magazine, of which Harris
was editor.
Frederick S. Church (1842 - 1924) was an American artist who often illustrated anthropomorphic
depictions of animals. Following his discharge from service as a Union soldier in
the Civil War, Church attended Chicago’s Academy of Design with the intention of
becoming an artist. He succeeded in becoming an acclaimed artist and his
illustrations appeared in many magazines and periodicals. Church provided
illustrations for Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings
(1880), though privately Harris was dissatisfied with Church’s racially caricatured
depictions, especially of Uncle Remus.
Samuel Clemens (also known by his pseudonym, Mark Twain) (1835 - 1910) was an American author
and humorist, recognized as “the father of American literature.” Twain is perhaps best known for
his two novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Clemens and Harris maintained professional and personal
interest in each other’s lives and work. Both began their writing careers as authors of comedic
sketches for newspaper publication and both were interested in preserving regional speech and
culture through their writing.
Augustus Granville Dill (1881 - 1956), a former student of Du Bois’s at Atlanta
University, was the business manager and editorial assistant of The Crisis and later
The Brownies’ Book. He and Du Bois continued to collaborate on other projects,
including four books, until Dill was forced to resign from his role at the Crisis as
a result of his arrest for homosexual activity in 1928. Dill was also a talented
musician and played the organ for New York City’s John Haynes Holmes’ Community
Church.
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963) was one of the most important and influential leaders
of the African American community in the first half of the twentieth century. He was
a spokesperson for civil rights and urged African Americans to celebrate their
intellectual and cultural achievements. Du Bois opposed Booker T. Washington's
approach to dealing with racial inequality. Whereas Washington urged education and
opportunities that accommodated the social realities of Jim Crow segregation, Du Bois
advocated for the cultivation of what he termed “The Talented Tenth,” a group of
highly educated African Americans who would serve as leaders of the community and
help to enact social change. In 1910, Du Bois became the head of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and started the
organization’s journal entitled The Crisis. Aware that in order to become successful
race leaders African American children needed positive representations of
themselves and their people, Du Bois founded The Brownies Book in 1920.
Jessie Fauset (1882 - 1961) was best known for her role as literary editor of The Crisis from 1919-1926, where she helped promote the careers of
Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay among others. Long overlooked by scholars
and historians, Fauset’s contributions to the Harlem Renaissance are now recognized as
essential to the movement’s success. Along with supporting the development of other
artists, Fauset wrote many short stories, poems and published four novels. While
serving as the literary editor for The Brownies’ Book, Fauset not
only edited the works of other contributors, but also wrote many signed and unsigned pieces
for the magazine.
Arthur Burdett Frost (1851 - 1928) was an American illustrator and painter, and a pioneer of
comic strips and comic books. Frost illustrated several of Harris’s works including
Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892) and the fifteenth anniversary edition of
Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1895). He became Harris’s preferred
illustrator.
Hamlin Garland (1860 - 1940) was an American writer most known for his depiction of Midwest
farm life, particularly his collection of short stories entitled Main-Travelled
Roads (1891) and his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border (1917). Garland
befriended Harris during a trip to Atlanta where he visited Harris in his office at
the Atlanta Constitution.
Joel Chandler Harris, once a household
name in the United States, is relatively obscure today, though many readers will
readily recognize his recurring character, Uncle Remus, as well as figures from
African American folk traditions that
he made widely known: Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the Tar Baby. Harris’s
reputation precipitously declined after Disney released Song
of the South, which was based on his books. The movie was produced 38
years after Harris’s death, and has been widely criticized for idealizing
slavery through its depiction of the hyperbolically happy and loyal servant,
Uncle Remus. Even the film’s premiere in Atlanta underscored its racial
problems: James Baskett, the African American star of the film, was prohibited
from attending the viewing at the segregated theater.
Harris’s books—some of the most
influential and racially complicated children’s books of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries—reveal a complex picture of the sociopolitical
landscape in the South and in the nation as a whole in the decades following the
Civil War. Harris, a journalist in Georgia, was troubled by the rise of white
mob rule in the Jim Crow South. It appears from his journalism, fiction, and
correspondence that he hoped to make his white readers rethink the naturalized
racial hierarchies they were exposed to every day. From a contemporary
perspective, Harris’s career, examined closely, seems laden with
inconsistencies: while Harris was an advocate for the improvement of living
conditions and rights for black people in the South, he was also a
segregationist. While he (and later, his son) spoke out against
lynching and racial violence in Atlanta at the height of Jim Crow, his fiction
often appears nostalgic for the antebellum South. While he was widely admired in
his day for his careful attention to the sounds of the spoken stories of middle
Georgian African Americans, contemporary readers often find his stories choked
by phonetic spellings that seem to derogate the dignity of the African American
speaker.
Throughout his career, Harris was interested in fostering tolerance (though not
equality) by humanizing African-American characters to a white audience. He
believed that regular exposure to pictures of interracial harmony would be more
effective in convincing white Southerners of the rights of African Americans
than would political rhetoric. Near the end of his life, when he founded
Uncle Remus’s Magazine, he told
Andrew Carnegie that his primary objective was “to fit the
magazine to such gentle and sure persuasion with respect to the negro question,
which is also the white man’s question, that honest people cannot resist
them...” To Harris, the triptych of the Uncle Remus tales—Uncle Remus, the
anonymous little boy, and Brer Rabbit—was the perfect tool for this gentle
persuasion. In it, a white everychild is nurtured by a paternal servant who
instructs him in the morality of the underdog.
We have collected here numerous texts related to Harris: several of his
children’s books, selections from his
correspondence with significant
literary, artistic, and historical figures, as well as adaptations, advertisements, and other
ephemera related to his work. Together, they illustrate how Harris’s
stories and complicated depictions of racial difference resonated through
American culture and were adapted to different ends. We also offer some
editorial guidance: a biographical
essay and suggestions for further
readings about his life, a brief discussion of Harris’s work in the context of
folklore, and suggested further
readings. In coming months, we plan to add more content related to
Harris, including selections from his journalism at the Atlanta
Journal Constitution and excerpts from Uncle Remus
Magazine).
William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920) was an American realist author and literary critic. He
began his literary career by contributing poetry, short stories, and reviews to
magazines including the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine.
As first the assistant editor (1866-71) and later the editor of the Atlantic Monthly
(1871-1881), Howells wielded enormous influence over American literary taste. He helped advance
proponent of American realism. Howells most famous novel is The Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885).
Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) is arguably the most celebrated African American writer
of the Harlem Renaissance. In July 1920, The Brownies’ Book printed notice of
Hughes’s high school graduation and his photograph as part of the magazine’s tribute
to African American graduates. The Brownies’ Book would go on to publish an
assortment of Hughes’s writings and helped launch his career. Hughes worked in many
different genres including poetry, novels, short stories, and plays. His
contributions to the creation of African American children’s literature can be found
in The Brownies’ Book and in later collaborations with Arna Bontemps.
Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) was a British writer of short stories, poetry, and novels and
recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Kipling is arguably most
remembered for his contributions to children’s literature, including The Jungle Book
(1894) and Kim (1901). Kipling’s celebration of British imperialism, pervasive in
the writing he produced, has left him a controversial figure in the twenty-first
century. Kipling was a long-time admirer of Harris’s Uncle Remus stories whose
anthropomorphic animal characters Kipling cited as inspiration for his own writing.
Frances Trego Montgomery, who also published under the name of F. G. Wheeler, was a
Midwestern author of children’s books in the early twentieth century. She is most
famous for her books about a mischievous goat, called “Billy Whiskers"; the series
was a favorite of a young John F. Kennedy.
Mary Effie Lee (later Effie Lee Newsome) (1885 - 1979) was an important figure in the
emergence of African American children’s literature in the early twentieth century.
She was a frequent contributor to the The Brownies’ Book and later served as editor
of the children’s column of W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis, submitting
works of both poetry and illustration. Lee’s works were often shaped by an emphasis
on the natural world. An anthology of her selected works for children, entitled
Gladiola Garden, appeared in 1940.
Thomas Nelson Page (1853 - 1922) was an American writer, lawyer, and ambassador to Italy
during the First World War. As a writer, Page popularized the plantation tradition
of Southern writing which depicted a romanticized vision of plantation life and the
institution of slavery prior to the Civil War.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919), the 26th President of the United States, was famed for
his military and political leadership, as well as his work as a naturalist and
explorer. A vocal admirer of Harris and the Uncle Remus tales, Roosevelt invited
Harris to a private dinner at the White House in 1907.
Laura Wheeler Waring (1887 - 1948) was a successful and influential artist of the
Harlem Renaissance. Waring was among the artists displayed in the country’s first all
African American art exhibit in 1927. She was especially known for her portraits
of exemplary African Americans. Her illustrations appear extensively throughout The
Brownies Book. Waring worked as director of the art department at Pennsylvania's
Cheyney State Teachers College until her death in 1948.
