Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908)

I sought out this collection after reading a discussion thread not long ago about the most memorable/traumatizing short stories assigned by high school English teachers. Only 21 stories are included here, and they are limited to those of only American origin, but I thought it was a reasonably well-rounded collection. They range from the humorous and the delightfully disturbing to the incomprehensible ("The Call of Cthulhu") and the weirdly twisted, and I limited my reading to no more than a single story each day to allow more time to ruminate.… (mehr)

Uncle Remus is the fictional title character and narrator of a collection of black American folktales compiled and adapted by
Joel Chandler Harris and published in book form in 1881. Harris was a journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, and he 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 that he had heard and framing them in the plantation context. He wrote his stories in a dialect which represented
the voice of the narrators and their subculture. For this choice of framing, his collection has encountered controversy.… (mehr)