His mother, Mary Ann Harris, was an Irish immigrant, who was unmarried at the time of her son's birth, and his father was unknown. In 1862 Harris quit school to work, and was hired as an apprentice for the Confederate newspaper - The Countryman. Having a love of the written word since childhood (his mother was an avid reader) Harris took the opportunity with the paper to publish his own poems, review and humorous ditties. During his 4 year apprenticeship Harris also had access to the owner's library, reading profusely, as well as spending hundreds of hours in the slave quarters of the plantation where the newspaper was housed. It was in the slave quarters that Harris began to hear the stories he would later record as his
Uncle Remus tales.
After the dissolution of the Confederacy, Harris worked a few newspaper jobs before finding a home at the Savannah Morning News, one of the largest papers in the South, as an associate editor and leading humor columnist.
At the age of 27 (although claiming 24) Harris married 17 year old Mary Esther LaRose, and the couple had two children, but ended up having to flee Savannah in 1875 because of a Yellow Fever epidemic. They settled in Atlanta where Harris began work for the Atlanta Constitution, where he continued for 24 years. On July 20, 1879, Harris published "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as
Told By Uncle Remus," the first tale of 24 that would be published as Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). By his death at the age of 60 Harris had published more than 2 dozen more Uncle Remus books, and collected a total of 185 stories which were highly popular in the North and the South. James Wheldon Johnson proclaimed the collection "the greatest body of folklore America has produced."
