Well known for his humorous paragraphs widely reprinted across Georgia, Harris was quickly hired as a columnist and editorial writer by Atlanta’s major newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution.

The Constitution had for some time been using “an antebellum darky” named Old Si for comic comment on its editorial page. Written in dialect, the Old Si sketches had been a great hit, but their creator was leaving the paper. The new staff member was given the assignment; he told his employers, “I know the old time Middle Georgia Negro pretty well.”

A character named Remus appeared briefly in the October 31, 1876, issue, followed by Uncle Remus himself on November 28; for the next three years Harris periodically published sketches about this first Uncle Remus, an elderly ex-slave who occasionally dropped by the Constitution offices to beg from the staff and talk his darky talk. This Uncle Remus, little more than a delegate for white Atlanta’s views of Reconstruction blacks (“W’en freedom come out de niggers sorter got dere humps up, an’ dey staid dat way, twel bimeby dey begun fer ter git hongry, an’ den dey begun fer ter drap inter line right smartually”), eventually gave way to a second Uncle Remus, the “old time Negro” of the Brer Rabbit tales, whom Harris remembered as “a human syndicate . . . of three or four old darkies whom I had known. I just walloped them together into one person and called him Uncle Remus.”

This second Uncle Remus tells animal tales, the first of which appeared in the Constitution on July 20, 1879. Five months later he reappeared with the tar baby story, and from then until May 1880 he became a regular feature of the Constitution’s Sunday edition. The stories received such a favorable response and were reprinted so widely in other newspapers that in early 1880 the New York publisher D. Appleton contacted Harris about bringing out a book-length collection. Harris had already received over a thousand inquiries about the Uncle Remus tales, and the publisher was impressed. Appleton’s J. C. Derby stopped in Atlanta, contract in hand, on his way home from Alabama, where he had just collected Jefferson Davis’s memoirs, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.

Released in November 1880, although officially published in 1881 as part of Appleton’s catalogue of humorous publications, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings found instant praise, partly because white reviewers wanted to believe the book granted a glimpse of life behind the veil. The New York Times called it “the first real book of American folklore.” Northern readers unfamiliar with the South were urged to buy the book; one of Harrises New York correspondents wrote him that the stories “are, to people here, the first graphic pictures of genuine Negro life in the South.” The Dial followed this lead, praising the book for giving the “sentiments and habits of the negroes themselves.” The New York Evening Post proclaimed Uncle Remus the most significant contribution to the “literature of Negro life” that had ever been made, while Scribner’s Monthly felt Harris “had recorded in a style so true to character and tradition” that “it is safe to say that no one will ever undertake to improve his work.” Shrewd book men saw immediately that white interest in the supposed “sentiments and habits of the negroes” would sell books, especially if the presentation did not threaten. Charles A. Dana told Appleton, “Uncle Remus is a great book. It will not only have a large, but a permanent, an enduring, sale.”

Perennially shy, Harris continued to write Uncle Remus stories for the remaining twenty-eight years of his life, but avoided public acclaim. He also published nineteen other books, including a number of collections of local-color stories about Georgia, and a Reconstruction novel, Gabriel Tolliver, which expressed his moderate views on race and politics. All of this fiction was well received, but the judgment of time has relegated most of it to minor status. Only a few of Harris’s short stories, such as “Mingo” or “Free Joe,” have survived to be anthologized. Uncle Remus made Harris’s reputation, and without it he would be a relatively insignificant figure in American literary history.

Harris published a second Uncle Remus collection, Nights with Uncle Remus, in 1883; six more Uncle Remus volumes appeared during his lifetime, an additional two after he died. For the last two years of his life he edited and owned a family monthly, Uncle Remus’s Magazine, which at one point had a circulation of 200, 000. He kept his job as editorial writer at the newspaper until 1900 but after 1890 went to the office in the morning, collected his assignments, and returned home to compose his copy. Harris usually did his “own writing” at night, often surrounded by his children and, later, his grandchildren. A small man who grew increasingly heavy in his later years, apparently from lack of exercise, Harris suffered from ill health for the last decade of his life. He died in 1908 at the age of fifty-nine.

Harris’s life story is less important than the story of his creation, Uncle Remus, yet it becomes difficult to separate them. Mark Twain wrote of a group of children who waited eagerly to meet Harris, then turned away in disappointment after discovering he was white. The grinning illustration of Uncle Remus that appeared on the frontispiece of the first edition of Songs and Sayings was much better known during Harris’s lifetime than his own photograph, even though it bore little resemblance to any black human being, living or dead.