Other editions of book Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup

Solomon Northup’s harrowing true story, first published in 1853, was a key factor in the national debate over slavery prior to the American Civil War, significantly changing public opinion on the topic of abolition. It tells the horrifying tale of Solomon Northup, an educated, free black man living with his wife and children in New York, whose life takes an appalling turn when he is kidnapped, drugged, and sold into slavery.Shipped to New Orleans, he endures the life of a slave in Louisiana's isolated plantation country. For twelve long years, he endures the unimaginable brutality and inhumanity of daily life, while keeping his dignity intact and dreaming of one day returning home to the arms of his family.The film adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, Brad Pitt, and Michael Fassbender won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture.

Solomon Northup’s harrowing true story, first published in 1853, was a key factor in the national debate over slavery prior to the American Civil War, significantly changing public opinion on the topic of abolition. It tells the horrifying tale of Solomon Northup, an educated, free black man living with his wife and children in New York, whose life takes an appalling turn when he is kidnapped, drugged, and sold into slavery.Shipped to New Orleans, he endures the life of a slave in Louisiana's isolated plantation country. For twelve long years, he endures the unimaginable brutality and inhumanity of daily life, while keeping his dignity intact and dreaming of one day returning home to the arms of his family.The film adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, Brad Pitt, and Michael Fassbender won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture.

This is Solomon Northup's classic tale of his life as a freeman; his capture and sale into slavery; and his terrifying and awful twelve years on plantations, held in bondage and kept from his wife, family, and freedom. An important and seminal work describing the details of slavery and plantation life, Twelve Years a Slave is a classic of American literature, and a must read for anyone studying pre-Civil War history, the history of the South, African American studies, or the horrors of slavery.

The incredible true story of the kidnapping, enslavement, and rescue of Solomon Northup in the era before the Civil War—now a major motion picture!In 1841, Solomon Northup was a free man living in Saratoga Springs, New York, making a living as a violinist and spending his spare time with his wife and three young children. Lured to Washington, D.C., with the promise of a generous sum of money, Northup finds himself drugged, beaten, and sold before he can even begin to comprehend the tragic turn his life has taken. Twelve torturous years of slavery follow, with Northup passed from owner to owner, plantation to plantation, until his eventual rescue in 1853. Following his return to New York, Northup wrote and published this extraordinary book, one of the few accounts of American slavery written from the perspective of a man who had been free before being enslaved.Lost for nearly a century, Twelve Years a Slave offers unprecedented details of the slave markets of Washington, D.C., and describes the excruciating life on Southern cotton plantations. In its time, Twelve Years a Slave was a bestseller and ignited a national dialogue on slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. Northup’s unsparing portrayal of the life of a slave captured minds and eventually divided a nation.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

“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.

2010 reprint of 1855 edition. Twelve Years a Slave was written by Solomon Northup; a man who was born free but was bound into slavery later in life. The book, originally published in 1853, tells the story of how two men approached him under the guise of circus promoters who were interested in his violin skills. They offered him a generous but fair amount of money to work for their circus, and then offered to put him up in a hotel in Washington D.C. Upon arriving there he was drugged, bound, and moved to a slave pen in the city, after which he was sold. Northup's account describes the daily life of slaves in the American South during the period just before the civil war. He provides detailed accounts of their diet, the relationship between the master and slave, the means that slave catchers used to recapture them and the ugly realities that slaves suffered. Northup's slave narrative is comparable to that of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Ann Jacobs or William Wells Brown, and there are many similarities. Northup's also provides an extremely detailed description of Washington in 1841.

Twelve Years a Slave (1853) is a memoir and slave narrative by American Solomon Northup as told to and edited by David Wilson. Northup, a black man who was born free in New York state, details his being tricked to go to Washington, D.C., where he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South. After having been kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana by various masters, Northup was able to write to friends and family in New York, who in turn secured his release with the aid of the state. Northup's account provides extensive details on the slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, and describes at length cotton and sugar cultivation and slave treatment on major plantations in Louisiana. The work was published eight years before the Civil War by Derby & Miller of Auburn, New York,soon after Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), to which it lent factual support. Northup's book, dedicated to Stowe, sold 30,000 copies, making it a bestseller in its own right. After being published in several editions in the 19th century and later cited by specialist scholarly works on slavery in the United States, the memoir fell into public obscurity for nearly 100 years. It was re-discovered on separate occasions by two Louisiana historians, Sue Eakin (Louisiana State University at Alexandria) and Joseph Logsdon (University of New Orleans).In the early 1960s, they researched and retraced Solomon Northup’s journey and co-edited a historically annotated version that was published by Louisiana State University Press (1968).

The basis of the 2013 Academy Award–winning film 12 Years a Slave, this is the autobiography of Solomon Northup—an African American man born free in New York state who is tricked, kidnapped, taken to Washington, DC, and sold into slavery.Solomon experiences the true horrors of the slave trade—intense cruelty, beatings, sickness, negligence, barbarism, starvation. Throughout the book’s melancholic prose, Northup recounts these horrific experiences in excruciating and agonizing detail. In one of the book’s passages, he states: “My sufferings I can compare to nothing else than the burning agonies of hell!” For the next twelve years, Northup kept his identity hidden only to himself and remained imprisoned in this state of bondage.Originally published eight years before the Civil War and similar in many ways to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, this groundbreaking work gave Americans from the north razor-sharp, firsthand insight into the tragedies that were occurring in the South. Still today, Northup’s story is widely studied and reprinted, giving its readers a glimpse into a painful part of our country’s past.Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. It features literary phenomena with influence and themes so great that, after their publication, they changed literature forever. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our history through the words of the exceptional few.

Solomon Northup's riveting memoir written in 1853 and now an award winning major motion picture. Mr. Northup recounts his powerful life story of being born a free man in New York, kidnapped and forced into slavery for twelve years and then freed and reunited with his wife and children. 12 YEARS A SLAVE: NARRATIVE OF SOLOMON NORTHUP, A CITIZEN OF NEW-YORK, KIDNAPPED IN WASHINGTON CITY IN 1841 AND RESCUED IN 1853, FROM A COTTON PLANTATION NEAR THE RED RIVER IN LOUISIANA. "A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's many thousands gone who retained his humanity in the depths of degradation. It is also a chilling insight into the peculiar institution." -Saturday Review