This unforgettable memoir was the basis for the Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave. This is the true story of Solomon Northup, born a freeman in New York. He lived the American dream, with a house and a loving family - a wife and two kids. Then one day he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in the deep south. These are the true accounts of his twelve hard years as a slave. His extraordinary journey proves the resiliency of hope and the human spirit despite the most grueling and formidable of circumstances.

- The illustrations printed in the original book - Contemporary sources (1853--62), among them newspaper accounts of Northup's kidnapping and ordeal and commentary by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Thomas W. MacMahon - A Genealogy of Secondary Sources (1880-2015) presenting twenty-four voices spanning three centuries on the memoir's major themes. Contributors include George Washington Williams, Marion Wilson Starling, Kenneth Stampp, Robert B. Stepto, Trish Loughran, and David Fiske, Clifford W. Brown, Jr., and Rachel Seligman, among others - The 2013 film adaptation12...

12 Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup by 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 - Many of the statements contained in the following pages are corroborated by abundant evidence-others rest entirely upon Solomon's assertion. That he has adhered strictly to the truth the editor, at least, who has had an opportunity of detecting any contradiction or discrepancy in his statements, is well satisfied. He has invariably repeated the same story without deviating in the...

Twelve Years a Slave, sub-title: Narrative of Solomon Northup, citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana, is a memoir by Solomon Northup as told to and edited by David Wilson. It is a slave narrative of a black man who was born free in New York state but kidnapped in Washington, D.C., sold into slavery, and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana. He provided details of slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, as well as describing at length cotton and sugar cultivation on major...

The story of Solomon Northup is a bizarre and incredible one. Born a free black in New York State in 1808, he was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841, and spent most of the next 12 years as a slave on a Louisiana cotton plantation. His years in this condition of servitude were filled with abuse, apprehension, and a profound fear for his life (he narrowly escaped lynching). Northup's years in captivity are dramatically recounted here, as are his attempts to bring charges against the men who originally abducted him. An educated man when he entered slavery, Northup was able to write about the...