The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
VOLUME XVI. Early National Literature, Part II; Later National Literature, Part I.
§ 22. Joel Chandler Harris
Realism, or more exactly, perhaps, naturalism, ruled the decade. From all sections of the country came now a tide of short fiction the chief characteristic of which was its fidelity to local conditions. The Century published Page’s Marse Chan, a story entirely in negro dialect. Joel Chandler Harris contributed his inimitable Uncle Remus studies of negro folklore and added to them short stories of the mountain “crackers.” Mingo and Other Sketches, which appeared the same year as In the Tennessee Mountains, deals with the Craddock region and people but with surer hand. Harris was himself a native of Georgia hills, though he was by no means a “cracker,” and he spoke with the sympathy and the knowledge of a native, not as an outside spectator and an exhibitor like Miss Murfree. The same may be said of Richard Malcolm Johnston (1822–98), whose Dukesborough Tales, dealing with rural life in the Georgia of his youth, first were given to Northern readers in 1883.