A Little Union Scout

by Joel Chandler Harris

This is an episodic novel first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post earlier in the same year (1904). Typical of his war stories, Harris structured plot twists with a layer of romance. A review in the New York Times pointed out that "in the working out of its details, Mr. Harris has departed widely enough from the stereotyped order of things to give the old familiar happenings an air of decided freshness and reality."

181 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1904

About the author

Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist born in Eatonton, Georgia who wrote the Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus; His Songs and His Sayings, The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1881 & 1882), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), and Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1905).

The stories, based on the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect and in featuring a trickster hero called Br'er ("Brother") Rabbit, who uses his wits against adversity, though his efforts do not always succeed. The frog is the trickster character in traditional tales in Central and Southern Africa. The stories, which began appearing in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879, were popular among both Black and White readers in the North and South, not least because they presented an idealized view of race relations soon after the Civil War. The first published Brer Rabbit stories were written by President Theodore Roosevelt's uncle, Robert Roosevelt.