The Wren’s Nest (Classic)

This book is a compilation of animal stories, songs, and oral folklore collected from Southern black Americans. The stories are framed in the context of a plantation and told by the kindly old freedman Uncle Remus. Many of the tales are didactic, similar to Aesop's Fables, and belong to the trickster tale genre. Harris wrote the stories in a dialect he devised to represent the Deep South Black dialect of the time, aiming to preserve the cultural heritage and oral traditions of African Americans. The collection has been both praised for its capture of plantation Black dialect and criticized for its portrayal of plantation life and racist stereotypes.