Day 74. 7 Tales of Uncle Remus

All along this project, I had been thinking I would not be able to work with the stories in "Seven Tales of Uncle Remus," but I realized today that I could use Harris's own revised versions of the stories from his later books; in fact, it is really fascinating to be able to compare the dialect versions of the stories that he originally published in Dixie with those literary versions of later years. There are two of the seven stories that he did not republish, but I checked: unpublished works go into the public domain based on their date of creation, which means I can use those also; I'll remove the eye-dialect from the texts that are reproduced in Chase... which means I will have all of the Harris stories.

It was also fun to find out that Oliver Herford was Harris's illustrator for those books; he's someone I know from working on Aesop. My favorite is the one for Rabbit and Bear; here's Rabbit meeting Mrs. Bear. Harris uses Rabbit as the storyteller for this story, which I think is really cool!

Brother Bear Learns to Comb His Head