Harris, Joel Chandler:

$2,250 · Offered by William Reese Company

UNCLE REMUS HIS SONGS AND HIS SAYINGS THE FOLK-LORE OF THE OLD PLANTATION. First edition, BAL's second state, of the author's first book, with "presumptuous" on the last line of p.9 and "A Treatise on the Practice of Medicine" as the first book advertisement (rather than reviews of Uncle Remus). "A photographic reproduction of negro folk-lore, in accurate dialect....The instant success of this first Uncle Remus caused the greatest flood of dialect literature the country had known..." - Grolier Hundred. Despite Harris's sanitation of material for a general (White) audience, and the unavoidable self-selecting nature of his sources, Uncle Remus was still the first significant collection of African-American folklore published, and its wit and charm have made it one of the most enduring."As he compiled the stories originally for his column in the Atlanta Constitution late in the 1870s, Harris had an ambivalent attitude towards them, for he sensed immediately that they presented an important statement about the slave experience. In the Introduction to the first edition of the collected tales...Harris advised his readers that 'however humorous' the book may be in effect, 'its intention is perfectly serious'....It seems, although it cannot be proven absolutely, that the stories that Harris recorded earliest were indeed authentic slave tales" - Flusche, p.353.An uncommonly clean and attractive copy of an important book.

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