She was an avid reader and instilled in her son a love of language: "My desire to write—to give expression to my thoughts—grew out of hearing my mother read The Vicar of Wakefield.

Practical jokes helped Harris cloak his shyness and insecurities about his red hair, Irish ancestry, and illegitimacy, leading to both trouble and a reputation as a leader among the older boys.

In March 1862, Joseph Addison Turner, owner of Turnwold Plantation nine miles east of Eatonton, hired Harris to work as a printer's devil for his newspaper The Countryman.

He had access to Chaucer, Dickens, Sir Thomas Browne, Arabian Nights, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Thackeray, and Edgar Allan Poe.

He was less self-conscious there and felt his humble background as an illegitimate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant helped foster an intimate connection with the slaves.

Though he relished his position in Forsyth, Joe Harris accepted the $40-a-week job, a significant pay increase, and quickly established himself as Georgia's leading humor columnist while at the Morning News.

[10] Not long after taking the newspaper appointment, Harris began writing the Uncle Remus stories as a serial to "preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future.

"[11] Royalties from the book were modest, but allowed Harris to rent a six-room house in West End, an unincorporated village on the outskirts of Atlanta, to accommodate his growing family.

Two years later Harris bought the house and hired the architect George Humphries to transform the farmhouse into a Queen Anne Victorian in the Eastlake style.

"[13] Harris created the first version of the Uncle Remus character for The Atlanta Constitution in 1876 after inheriting a column formerly written by Samuel W. Small, who had taken leave from the paper.

[23] Early in his career at the Atlanta Constitution, Joe Harris laid out his editorial ideology and set the tone for an agenda that aimed to help reconcile issues of race, class, and region: "An editor must have a purpose.

While at the Constitution, Harris, "in thousands of signed and unsigned editorials over a twenty-four-year period, ... set a national tone for reconciliation between North and South after the Civil War".

He regularly denounced racism among southern whites, condemned lynching, and highlighted the importance of higher education for African Americans, frequently citing the work of W.E.B.

"[25] Harris also oversaw some of The Atlanta Constitution's most sensationalized coverage of racial issues, including the 1899 torture and lynching of Sam Hose, an African-American farm worker.

Harris resigned from the paper the following year, having lost patience for publishing both "his iconoclastic views on race" and "what was expected of him" at a major southern newspaper during a particularly vitriolic period.

[29] In 1904 Harris wrote four important articles for The Saturday Evening Post discussing the problem of race relations in the South; these highlighted his progressive yet paternalistic views.

Harris wrote to Andrew Carnegie that its purpose would be to further "the obliteration of prejudice against the blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in the face without blushing.

[32] Harris wrote novels, narrative histories, translations of French folklore, children's literature, and collections of stories depicting rural life in Georgia.

The short stories "Free Joe and the Rest of the World", "Mingo", and "At Teague Poteets" are the most influential of his non-Uncle Remus creative work.

[33] Harris' books exerted a profound influence on storytellers at home and abroad, yet the Uncle Remus tales effectively have no critical standing.

[35]Keith Cartwright, however, asserts, "Harris might arguably be called the greatest single authorial force behind the literary development of African American folk matter and manner.

"[36] In 1981 the writer Alice Walker accused Harris of "stealing a good part of my heritage" in a searing essay called "Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine".

Examples include the Ila language Sulwe mbwakatizha Muzovu ("Hare makes the elephant afraid") in Smith & Dale The Ila-Speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia volume 2, page 309.

[39] In the totally unrelated Kanuri or Bornuese culture in Northern Nigeria, such tales as a Fable of Jackal and a Hyena[40] display similar themes quite in the Brer Rabbit manner.

Some critical scholars cite Uncle Remus as a problematic and contradictory figure: sometimes a mouthpiece for white paternalism, sometimes a stereotype of the black entertainer, and sometimes poetically subversive.

[42]The author Ralph Ellison was positive about Harris' work: Aesop and Uncle Remus had taught us that comedy is a disguised form of philosophical instruction; and especially when it allows us to glimpse the animal instincts lying beneath the surface of our civilized affectations.

[45] These recent acknowledgements echo early observations from Walter Hines Page, who wrote in 1884 that Harris "hardly conceals his scorn for the old aristocracy" and makes "a sly thrust at the pompous life of the Old South.

"[46] More recently, the scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar debated whether to include Uncle Remus stories in their 2017 volume, The Annotated African American Folktales.

[54] Many scholars cite Harris' influence on William Faulkner, most importantly in terms of dialect usage,[55] depictions of African Americans,[56] lower-class whites,[57] and fictionalized landscape.

Walter White of the NAACP acknowledged "the remarkable artistic merit" of the film in his telegraphed press release on November 27, 1946, but decried the "impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship.