Twelve Years a Slave (Barnes & Noble Signature Editions)

by Solomon Northup, Eric Ashley Hairston (Introduction)

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781435165359
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Series:	Barnes & Noble Signature Editions
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Born in 1808, Solomon Northup lived the life of a free man and educated tradesman in New York. He was early acquainted with voting and civic life through his father. Like his father, he maintained a cordial relationship with the white family that had previously held his own family in bondage, an association that would help secure his freedom. Northup and his wife, Anne Hampton Northup, were engaged in a quintessentially American quest for social and economic advancement when he was enticed away from the safety of Saratoga Springs, New York, with the promise of work and kidnapped into slavery in 1841.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A moving, vital testament." —-Saturday Review

Editorial Reviews

"A moving, vital testament." —-Saturday Review

From the Publisher