This auction is for an original 1908 edition of "UNCLE REMUS: HIS SONGS AND HIS SAYINGS" by Joel Chandler Harris.

YOU'LL LOVE THIS BOOK!!!

It is a collection of animal stories, songs, ballads, oral folklore, and plantation stories collected from the folktales of Southern Blacks.

It contains 265 pages and is beautifully illustrated with an astounding
112 ILLUSTRATIONS!!!
by A. B. FROST.

Uncle Remus, the title character and fictional narrator of these stories, is a kindly old slave who serves as a storytelling device passing on the folktales to the white children gathered around him.

These tales were created out of sorrow but the hearts and minds of the black people who formed them and passed them on to us were full of love and hope.

LOOK AT THESE TALES AS A CELEBRATION OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT!

The stories are told in Harris' version of Deep South slave dialect with a moral message. The genre of stories is the "trickster tale." Trickster stories are short narratives that use animal characters with human features to convey folk wisdom and to help us understand human nature and human behavior.

These stories were originally passed down by African slaves through oral tradition and eventually developed into BRER RABBIT stories. They were eventually written down in the 19th century in the Southern States of America.

At the time of Harris' publication, his work was praised for its ability to capture plantation negro dialect.

Harris's Constitution editorials expanded on the social, political, and literary themes he had begun exploring in Forsyth and Savannah—themes he would also treat both directly and indirectly in his folktales and fiction to come. When he was asked to fill in for absent dialect-writer Sam Small, he invented an engaging black character named Uncle Remus, who liked dropping by the Constitution offices to share humorous anecdotes and sardonic insights about life on the streets of bustling postwar Atlanta.

An article Harris read on African-American folklore in Lippincott's, which included a transcribed story of "Buh Rabbit and the Tar Baby," reminded him of the Brer Rabbit trickster stories he had heard from the slaves at Turnwold Plantation. His Uncle Remus character now began to tell old plantation folktales, back-home aphorisms, and slave songs. Newspapers around the country eagerly reprinted his rural legends and sayings. Before long, Harris had composed enough material for this book. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings—The Folklore of the Old Plantation, originally published by Appleton in November 1880. Enlivened with gentle humor and irony, homely wisdom, and kind sympathy and combined with unrivaled knowledge of negro dialect and character, makes "Uncle Remus" unique among folk-stories.