Thus was New York discovered via Albany and Fort Lee, and five minutes after the two touched glasses, the brim of the schoppin and the Manhattan cocktail tinkled together, and New York was inaugurated.
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.
(“UNCLE REMUS.”)
OEL CHANDLER HARRIS has called himself “an accidental author,” for while living on a plantation as a typesetter on a country newspaper he became familiar with the curious myths and animal stories of the negroes, and some time in the seventies he printed a magazine article on these folk-lore stories, giving at the same time some of the stories as illustration.
This article attracted attention and revealed to the writer the fact that the stories had a decided literary value, and his main literary work has been the elaboration of these myths.
The stories of “Uncle Remus” are, as almost everyone knows, not creations of the author’s fancy, but they are genuine folk-lore tales of the negroes, and strangely enough many of these stories are found in varying forms among the American Indians, among the Indians along the Amazon and in Brazil, and they are even found in India and Siam, which fact has called out learned discussions of the origin and antiquity of the stories and the possible connection of the races.