Remus' stories featured a trickster hero called Br'er Rabbit (Brother Rabbit), who used his wits against adversity, though his efforts did not always succeed. Br'er Rabbit is a direct interpretation of Yoruba tales of Hare, though some others posit Native American influences as well. The scholar Stella Brewer Brookes asserts, "Never has the trickster been better exemplified than in the Br'er Rabbit of Harris." Br'er Rabbit was accompanied by friends and enemies, such as Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear, Br'er Terrapin, and Br'er Wolf. The stories represented a significant break from the fairy tales of the Western tradition: instead of a singular event in a singular story, the critters on the plantation existed in an ongoing community saga, time immemorial. Harris described Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin", as a major influence on the characters of Uncle Remus and the Little Boy. When he read Stowe's novel in 1862, he said that it "made a more vivid impression upon my mind than anything I have ever read since." Interpreting "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a "wonderful defense of slavery," Harris argued that Stowe's "genius took possession of her and compelled her, in spite of her avowed purpose, to give a very fair picture of the institution she had intended to condemn". In Harris's view, the "real moral that Mrs. Stowe's book teaches is that the ... realities [of slavery], under the best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty and tenderness all their own." The Uncle Remus stories garnered critical acclaim and achieved popular success well into the 20th century. Harris published at least twenty-nine books, of which nine books were compiled of his published Uncle Remus stories, including "" (1880), "Nights with Uncle Remus" (1883), "Uncle Remus and His Friends" (1892), "The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus" (1904), "" (1905), "Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit" (1907). The last three books written by Joel Chandler Harris were published after his death which included "Uncle Remus and the Little Boy" (1910), "Uncle Remus Returns" (1918), and "Seven Tales of Uncle Remus" (1948). The tales, 185 in sum, became immensely popular among both black and white readers in the North and South.