Books with author Eric Ashley Hairston

Originally published in 1853, Twelve Years a Slave is a haunting portrayal of stolen freedom and brutal life on the sugar and cotton plantations of the Deep South. Landowner, carpenter, and skilled violinist Solomon Northup is living comfortably with his wife and children in Saratoga, New York, when two circus promoters offer him work as a traveling musician. They then drug and kidnap him, and Northup is sold into slavery and transported to Louisiana, spending twelve grueling years in captivity, at the whim of several ruthless slave owners. With its gripping and horrendous accounts of slave life in the Deep South, Solomon Northup’s seminal memoir is now available as an elegantly designed clothbound edition with an elastic closure and a new introduction.

Former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass tells his incredible, painful story of going from a slave to a free man and eventually an abolitionist leader.The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is widely considered to be the most significant work to have been written by a former slave. This memoir, first published in 1845 set the tone for the American abolitionist movement. Within four months of its publication, more than five thousand copies had made their ways into the hands of the American people. Part of what made this memoir so key, was that it not only described Douglass' life as a slave, but it also reveals his tremendous journey to becoming a free man. Douglass would go on to become a leader in the abolitionist movement with his future anti-slavery writings. Key reading for sociologists and historians this elegantly designed clothbound edition features an elastic closure and a new introduction by Eric A. Hairston.

“In a stunning reversal of stereotype, he is often a man among beasts.” —Eric Ashley Hairston, from the Introduction Twelve Years a Slave, a chronicle of the amazing ordeal of Solomon Northup, a free African American kidnapped in the North and impressed into slavery in Louisiana, is one of the most compelling and detailed slave narratives in existence. “There must have been some misapprehension—some unfortunate mistake,” writes Northup. “It could not be that a free citizen of New York, who had wronged no man, nor violated any law, should be dealt with thus inhumanly.” As an educated man, torn from freedom and plunged into slavery, he brings into exact clarity the life and labor of slaves in the antebellum American South, the complex economic choices and ironic moral concessions of slaveholding, and the calamitous effect of slavery on the foundations of civilization. Throughout his horrific imprisonment, Solomon Northup resists the urge to laud himself as an exemplary character or focus solely on his own experience, giving contemporary readers a remarkable and complex account of the lives of the slave community as a whole. A bestseller when it was first published, Twelve Years a Slave remains today a stunning American odyssey.