Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings - Joel Chandler Harris - Uncle Remus is the fictional title character and narrator of a collection of African-American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881. A journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, Georgia, Harris produced seven Uncle Remus books. Harris wanted to show that life in the Southern United States was hard and that they struggled a lot. The term that comes along with this is "folk uncanny". Harris wrote these stories to represent the struggle in the Southern United States, and more specifically in the plantations. He did so by introducing tales he had heard and framing them in the plantation context. These stories were written in a dialect that represented the voice of the narrators and their subculture. It is for this choice of framing that his collection has led to controversy.