Go There To Know There

The Tar Baby Stories: Joel Chandler Harris *From Wikimedia Commons Joel Chandler Harris (1845-1908), was an American fiction writer, folklorist, and a journalist for the Atlanta Constitution . From 1862-1866, Harris served as an apprentice at Turnwold Plantation, in Eatonton, Georgia. While there, he spent much of his leisure time among the slaves of the plantation from whom he learned the storytelling tradition among African Americans whose oral tradition became the basis for his collection of Uncle Remus Tales . Though Harris has been credited for having revolutionized children's literature with his collection of folktales about the post-Reconstruction American South, contemporary critics argue that his rendition of these tales fosters an erroneous and romanticized image of the plantation South. Joel Chandler Harris Our texts cautions that "like other oral forms these tales were originally invented not for the printed page but for the spoken p...