ABSTRACT
For the great majority of his modern readers, Joel Chandler Harris's considerable national and international renown rests primarily on one area of his literary accomplishment, his achievement as the master storyteller who expertly recreated in print the Afro-American fables from the folklore of the pre-Civil War American plantation slave of the deep South. Harris's own purely original fiction gained him another reputation as a short story writer and novelist who took as his most frequent setting the small-town rural South. He distinguished himself as creator of local color fiction that sought to capture the flavor of the region in speech, manners, and attitudes, focusing often on the time preceding, during, and immediately following the Civil War, especially the Reconstruction. Finally, Harris had yet another successful literary career, writing his purely original non-black-folklore-based children's books.
