> Skip to content
[]
  • Published: 12 December 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141395333
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook

Twelve Years a Slave




An official tie-in edition of this eloquent and powerful memoir, to accompany Steve McQueen's major new film starring Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Quvenzhané Wallis.

Solomon Northup is a free man, living in New York. Then he is kidnapped and sold into slavery.

Drugged, beaten, given a new name and transported away from his wife and children to a Louisiana cotton plantation, Solomon will die if he reveals his true identity. This is the searing true story of his twelve years as a slave: the endless brutality, daily humiliations and constant fear, but also the small ways in which he and his fellow men try to survive.

Twelve Years a Slave is a unique, unflinching record of slavery from the inside, and the incredible account of one man whose life was ripped from him - and who fought to get it back.

'A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's "many thousands gone" who retained his humanity in the bowels of degradation' - Saturday Review


'I could not believe that I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Frank's diary, only published nearly a hundred years before' - Steve McQueen

Solomon Northup was a free man kidnapped into slavery in Washington, D.C. in 1841. Shortly after

his escape, he published his memoirs to great acclaim and brought legal action against his

abductors, though they were never prosecuted. The details of his life thereafter are unknown, but he is believed to have died in Glen Falls, New York, around 1863.
%%%An official tie-in edition of this eloquent and powerful memoir, to accompany Steve McQueen's major new film starring Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Quvenzhané Wallis.
Solomon Northup is a free man, living in New York. Then he is kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Drugged, beaten, given a new name and transported away from his wife and children to a Louisiana cotton plantation, Solomon will die if he reveals his true identity. This is the searing true story of his twelve years as a slave: the endless brutality, daily humiliations and constant fear, but also the small ways in which he and his fellow men try to survive.
Twelve Years a Slave is a unique, unflinching record of slavery from the inside, and the incredible account of one man whose life was ripped from him - and who fought to get it back.
'A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's "many thousands gone" who retained his humanity in the bowels of degradation' - Saturday Review
'I could not believe that I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Frank's diary, only published nearly a hundred years before' - Steve McQueen
Solomon Northup was a free man kidnapped into slavery in Washington, D.C. in 1841. Shortly after
his escape, he published his memoirs to great acclaim and brought legal action against his
abductors, though they were never prosecuted. The details of his life thereafter are unknown, but he is believed to have died in Glen Falls, New York, around 1863.

  • Published: 12 December 2013
  • ISBN: 9780141395333
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook

Other books in the series

The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
A Dog's Heart
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Botchan
Military Dispatches

About the authors

Solomon Northup

Solomon Northup was kidnapped into slavery in Washington, D.C. in 1841. Shortly after his escape, he published his memoirs to great acclaim and brought legal action against his abductors, though they were never persecuted. The details of his life thereafter are unknown, but he is believed to have died in Glen Falls, NY, around 1863.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored numerous books, including most recently Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow and The Black Church, and has created more than twenty documentary films, including his groundbreaking genealogy series Finding Your Roots. His six-part PBS documentary, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, earned an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and an NAACP Image Award. This series and his PBS documentary series Reconstruction: America after the Civil War were both honored with the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. His most recent PBS documentary is Gospel.