In the Georgia swamplands and plantations, a cast of anthropomorphic animals enacts daily rituals of pursuit, trickery and escape. In this pre-Loony Toons world of sassy, talking beasts, Brer Rabbit is the hero — duelling both verbally and physically with those who would eat him, and perpetually in the monstrous shadow of the Tar Baby.

The casual publication in 1877 of "The Tar Baby" by Joel Chandler Harris, found Harris his literary vocation. In the following years he developed his own plantation mythology in a series of volumes, narrated by "Uncle Remus", telling colloquial tales of the wily hero Brer Rabbit (an obvious precursor of Bugs Bunny) and his clashes with the villain, Brer Fox. Tar Baby is a collection of some of the finest of these often surreal and grotesque stories, in the original African American dialect, and is presented as a classic of American literature for both adult readers and children of all ages.