Twelve Years a Slave (Volume 55) (Knickerbocker Classics, 55)

Originally published in 1853, Twelve Years a Slave is a haunting portrayal of stolen freedom and brutal life on the sugar and cotton plantations of the Deep South.

Landowner, carpenter, and skilled violinist Solomon Northup is living comfortably with his wife and children in Saratoga, New York, when two circus promoters offer him work as a traveling musician. They then drug and kidnap him, and Northup is sold into slavery and transported to Louisiana, spending twelve grueling years in captivity, at the whim of several ruthless slave owners.

With its gripping and horrendous accounts of slave life in the Deep South, Solomon Northup’s seminal memoir is now available as an elegantly designed clothbound edition with an elastic closure and a new introduction.

The Knickerbocker Classics bring together the works of classic authors from around the world in stunning gift editions to be collected and enjoyed. Complete and unabridged, these elegantly designed cloth-bound hardcovers feature a slipcase and ribbon marker, as well as a comprehensive introduction providing the reader with enlightening information on the author's life and works.
 

Solomon Northup (c. 1808-c. 1863) ­was a free-born African American landowner from New York state who was kidnapped and solid into slavery in 1841, without a word to his wife or children. After twelve horrifying years in the Red River region of Louisiana, he finally regained his freedom, returning to his family in New York and publishing his memoir in 1853. Northup’s book was a bestseller, and he became an outspoken abolitionist before disappearing from historical record around the year 1857.
 Eric Ashley Hairston is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Law and Humanities at Elon University. He holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from the University of North Carolina and is author of The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization and the African American Reclamation of the West.