Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) collected the folktales of Southern African Americans and retold them as classic stories of Uncle Remus, a fictitious old slave who spun stories to a boy from "the big house of a plantation." He wrote five books featuring Uncle Remus and his stories of Brer Rabbit and friends, and the first, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, was published in 1880.
