. . know nothing at all of what is termed literary art. I have had no opportunity to nourish any serious literary ambition.” He was “embarrassed” by his success: “People persist in calling me a literary man, when I am a journalist and nothing else.”

Harris was obviously of two minds about his fame — on the one hand he sought it by continuing to write, on the other he felt unworthy of it — and those two minds were seldom very far from the surface. In an extraordinary letter to his daughter, well after he was a national figure, Harris personified the two sides of his personality:

As for myself — though you could hardly call me a real, sure enough author — I never have anything but the vaguest ideas of what I am going to write; but when I take my pen in my hand, the rust clears away and the “other fellow” takes charge. You know all of us have two entities, or personalities. That is the reason you see and hear persons “talking to themselves.” They are talking to the “other fellow.” I have often asked my “other fellow” where he gets all his information, and how he can remember, in the nick of time, things that I have forgotten long ago; but he never satisfies my curiosity. He is simply a spectator of my folly until I seize a pen, and then he comes forward and takes charge.

Sometimes I laugh heartily at what he writes . . . is not my writing at all; it is my “other fellow” doing the work and I am getting all the credit for it. Now, I’ll admit that I write the editorials for the paper. The “other fellow” has nothing to do with them, and, so far as I am able to get his views on the subject, he regards them with scorn and contempt . . . He is a creature hard to understand, but, so far as I can understand him, he’s a very sour, surly fellow until I give him an opportunity to guide my pen in subjects congenial to him; whereas, I am, as you know, jolly, good-natured, and entirely harmless.

Now, my “other fellow,” I am convinced, would do some damage if I didn’t give him an opportunity to work off his energy in the way he delights.

Harris’s psychological complexity was masked by an uneventful biography. Born in 1848, he grew up illegitimate in a small rural village, Eatonton, Georgia. Harris’s biographers have long suggested that his birth out of wedlock explains his anxieties. Perhaps so, but the fact also remains that Harris was a kind and loving father and husband, nowhere exhibiting in his domestic life the kinds of inadequacies he apparently felt in the larger world. He also was a competent, conscientious, and professional journalist all of his adult life; his journalism displays authority and wit; there is no hint of the shyness of the man himself, perhaps because, as he once wrote, “You know, of course, that I do most of my talking with the pen.” Walter Hines Page, visiting Harris shortly after the initial success of Uncle Remus, could only remark, “It was impossible to believe the man realized what he had done. . . . Joe Harris [the journalist] does not appreciate Joel Chandler Harris.”

Reared by a strong-willed mother who refused to act as a community outcast, who stimulated her son’s literary ambitions by reading to him nightly from The Vicar of Wakefield, Harris left home at the age of thirteen to learn the printer’s trade on the only newspaper ever published on a plantation, Joseph Turner’s The Countryman, printed at “Turnwold,” nine miles from Eatonton in Putnam County.

Turner was an unusual man, “good” to his slaves, literate, cultivated, and eccentric, and he shaped Harris in many ways, serving as a kind of literary father. He placed his large library at Harris’s disposal and both encouraged and demanded the discipline necessary for a young writer. Harris began publishing juvenile pieces in The Countryman, displaying considerable wit for a printer’s devil.

Harris’s semiautobiographical account of his years at Turnwold, On the Plantation, reports that he befriended a runaway slave shortly after arriving, an act of kindness that caused Turnwold’s black citizens to treat him with special respect: “There was nothing they were not ready to do for him at any time of day or night.” Two slaves in particular took him under their wing. Masters of the tale teller’s art, “Uncle” George Terrell and “Old” Harbert shared with him their repertoire of folktales. Terrell owned a Dutch oven in which he made ginger cakes each Saturday, then sold them to the children of planters. At twilight, by the light of the oven’s fire, he told stories to the Turner children and Joe Harris.

Harris left Turnwold in 1866 after The Countryman stopped publishing and spent the next decade building a newspaper career, including among his stops Forsyth, Georgia (1867-70), where the town gardener was named Remus. In the fall of 1876, a yellow fever epidemic forced him to leave a paper he had edited in Savannah and bring his family to Atlanta.