**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 one of the darkest periods in
American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in
New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of
fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the
next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton
plantation.
After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and
detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and
today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the
very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated
as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having
been both a free man and a slave.
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up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
