Joel Chandler Harris was born in 1848 in the United States and raised in Georgia. He grew up to be a journalist and author.

His stories are based on the African-American oral storytelling tradition. The fictional narrator of many of his stories is Uncle Remus, an old black man. Joel Chandler Harris learned these stories from black slaves when he was a poor white boy growing up in the South before the United States' Civil War.

Harris in writing tried to preserve the way Southern people actually spoke by spelling words the way they sounded. Many of these stories really tell how slaves secretly outwitted their masters. Harris told the stories in a way that made everybody enjoy them. His stories were popular among both black and white readers in the North and South.