The trickster Spider Anansi is a famous folklore figure in West Africa, and slaves abducted from West Africa brought the stories of Anansi with them to the Americas. This book of Jamaica Anansi Stories contains stories collected in Jamaica during the early years of the 20th century by Martha Warren Beckwith, a professor of folklore and well-known ethnographer. Beckwith recorded the stories in dialect as told to her by Jamaican storytellers.