Twelve Years a Slave
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in pre-Civil War American history and the study of slavery
- History enthusiasts willing to read the English original and focused on first-hand personal accounts
- Teachers and students who need selected source material to supplement classroom discussion
- Readers who enjoy documentary memoirs and can bear heavy subject matter
Not a good fit for
- Readers who want only light stories and avoid depictions of violence and oppression
- Readers unaccustomed to nineteenth-century English who want to finish quickly
- Professional researchers expecting systematic scholarly annotation and full historical background material
Reading tips
- Read the opening and the closing section after his rescue first, then return to the twelve years of plantation experience in the middle.
- Mark names, places, and transaction details as you go, and look back later at how these threads form a picture of the institution.
- Read alongside general materials on the history of American slavery, distinguishing layers of personal memory from macro-historical fact.
- Limit yourself to one or two chapters a day and write down one or two scenes that struck you most, to avoid emotional fatigue from continuous reading.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
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About the author
Solomon Northup (Northup, Solomon, 1808–1863?), an African American born in 1808, with the year of his death difficult to ascertain. Public information about him is limited, and his life is known chiefly through his own memoir. A free man, he was lured away and sold into slavery and endured twelve years of bondage in the slaveholding South before being rescued and regaining his freedom. After his rescue, he wrote his firsthand account as the memoir Twelve Years a Slave, describing his abduction, his resale and the details of slave life, and his eventual return to freedom. Told from the perspective of one who lived it and in plain prose, the book presents the everyday reality of American slavery and became an important testimony for the abolitionist movement; rediscovered in the twentieth century and adapted into a film of the same name, its influence endures.
