All Formats & Editions

The basis for the Academy Award(R)-winning movie
"A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's 'many thousand gone' who retained his humanity in the bowels of degradation." -- Saturday ReviewBorn a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped... Read Full Overview

Now the major motion picture that won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyong'o, and directed by Steve McQueen Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about... Read Full Overview

New York Times and USA Today Bestseller Golden Globe Winner for Best Drama In this enhanced/authenticated edition by Dr. Sue Eakin of the riveting true slave narrative that reads like a novel, you are transported to 1840's New York, Washington, D.C., and Louisiana to experience... Read Full Overview

The basis for the Academy Award(R)-winning movie
"A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's 'many thousand gone' who retained his humanity in the bowels of degradation." -- Saturday Review Born a free man in New York State in 1808, Solomon Northup was kidnapped... Read Full Overview

Now the major motion picture that won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyong'o, and directed by Steve McQueen

Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is... Read Full Overview

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback

Solomon Northup was born free as the son of an emancipated slave, who lived and worked in New York. In 1841, two con men offered him lucrative work playing fiddle in a circus, so he travelled with them to Washington, D.C., where he was drugged, kidnapped, and sold as a slave... Read Full Overview

12 Years A Slave: A True Story is a powerful memoir that exposes the harrowing reality of slavery in America. Solomon Northup's firsthand account of his twelve years of bondage is a haunting and courageous narrative that sheds light on the brutality and dehumanization endured... Read Full Overview

Solomon Northup was a free man, the son of an emancipated Negro Slave. Until the spring of 1841 he lived a simple, uneventful life with his wife and three children in Upstate New York. Then, suddenly, he fell victim to a series of bizarre events that make this one of the most... Read Full Overview

Having been born a freeman, and for more than thirty years enjoyed the blessings of liberty in a free State--and having at the end of that time been kidnapped and sold into Slavery, where I remained, until happily rescued in the month of January, 1853, after a bondage of twelve... Read Full Overview

Solomon Northup (born c.1807) was an American abolitionist and author. Born free to a freed slave and a free African American woman, he was a professional violinist, farmer and landowner until he was offered a job as a musician in Washington D.C., where he was drugged and kidnapped... Read Full Overview

The Norton Critical Edition also includes:
- 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... Read Full Overview

The story that inspired the major motion picture, with an introduction by the bestselling author of Wench , Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing, vividly detailed, and utterly unforgettable account of slavery. The story that inspired the major motion picture,... Read Full Overview