Extract: "Literary and Journalistic Fame"

      Of his stories, Joel Chandler Harris once claimed, "There is nothing here but an old negro man, a little boy, and a dull reporter."He called himself an "accidental author"and a "cornfield journalist,"but he was wrong.
      The public loved his stories, making him one of the most popular and respected writers of the late nineteenth century. Politicians, business executives, and the working class all praised him. His friends included Andrew Carnegie and James Whitcomb Riley.
       President Theodore Roosevelt called him a genius, and said that his works are "the most striking and powerful permanent contributions to literature that have been produced on this side of the ocean."Carnegie said that in addition to "giving a helping hand to all the world,"Harris "has won the hearts of all the children, and that's glory enough for one man."A small Brer Rabbit mascot sat near the edge of the desk of Samuel Gompers, founding president of the American Federation of Labor, and always went with him whenever he traveled. An hour the former cigar-maker spent with Harris in Atlanta was, he said, "an hour of the most unalloyed joy I have ever experienced."
       Mark Twain helped establish Harris's literary credibility when he declared, "Uncle Remus is most deftly drawn and is a lovable and delightful creature; he and the little boy and their relations with each other are bright, fine literature, and worthy to live."
      James C. Derby, one of the nation's most distinguished book editors during the latter half of the nineteenth century, characterized Harris as: "the very best delineator of Southern negro character which the country developed. [His] dialectic stories, in which the shrewd wit and sententious sayings of "Uncle Remus"are given, have never been equaled."
       In 1897, William Baskervill, professor of English at Vanderbilt and the nation's foremost critic of Southern literature of the nineteenth century, pointed out in Southern Writers that Uncle Remus was "one of the very few original creations of American writers worthy of a place in the gallery of immortals,"that the stories were "the most valuable and permanent contribution to American letters in the last quarter of this century,"and that Harris was "the most sympathetic, the most original, the truest delineator of this larger life [and its] manners, amusements, dialect, folklore, humor, pathos, and character."That same year, the Library of the World's Best Literature, edited by nationally-known author/journalist Charles Dudley Warner, devoted 14 pages to Harris's life and stories. Walter Hines Page, one of the nation's most influential editors and publishers during the
      late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, boldly stated that Harris's first compilation of Uncle Remus tales was "so great a piece of literature that if all the histories and records of slave-life in the South were blotted out, a diligent antiquarian thousands of years hence could reconstruct it in its essential features from the three human figures that Mr. Harris has used Uncle Remus, the little boy, and Miss Sally."
       The New York Times [in 1904] declared that Harris "easily stands among the very best of the story tellers and is at the same time in full possession of the old-fashioned disposition to exercise his story-telling abilities in making his readers acquainted with one company after another of the delightful characters of which his imagination seems to hold an unlimited supply."Journalist-author Bret Harte, who would later become recognized as one of the nation's finest short story writers, placed Harris among five writers he considered to be America's top short story writers.
       A survey of high school and college literature teachers in 1926, two decades after Harris's death, ranked the Uncle Remus tales fifth among all American works, behind Edgar Allan Poe's Tales, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans.
       J. Mason Brewer, one of the nation's most-respected folklorists, called the Uncle Remus tales "The first, and still the most significant and authentic, volume of Negro animal tales."Harold W. Thompson, president of the American Folklore Society, pointed out: "There is no doubt that the Uncle Remus stories head the list of our country's folktales, and there should be no doubt that their author must be included in the roster of the dozen American writers who have contributed most to the world's literature."Author-folklorist Julius Lester, in the foreword of The Tales of Uncle Remus (1987), the first of four reworkings of the Uncle Remus tales, noted: "Although Harris never studied folklore, and was embarrassed when others acclaimed him a folklorist, his integrity regarding the tales was exemplary and remarkable."R. Bruce Bickley Jr. and Hugh P. Keenan, two of the leading experts on the life of Joel Chandler Harris, state in their 1997 bibliography, "With Uncle Remus's help, Harris led his black and poor white characters out of their shanties, past the Big House of the old plantation era, and openly down the Big Road into the twentieth century."