The basis of the 2013 Academy Award-winning film 12 Years a Slave,
this is the autobiography of Solomon Northup--an African American man
born free in New York state who is tricked, kidnapped, taken to
Washington, DC, and sold into slavery.
Solomon experiences the true horrors of the slave trade--intense
cruelty, beatings, sickness, negligence, barbarism, starvation.
Throughout the book's melancholic prose, Northup recounts these horrific
experiences in excruciating and agonizing detail. In one of the book's
passages, he states: "My sufferings I can compare to nothing else than
the burning agonies of hell!" For the next twelve years, Northup kept
his identity hidden only to himself and remained imprisoned in this
state of bondage.
Originally published eight years before the Civil War and similar in
many ways to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, this
groundbreaking work gave Americans from the north razor-sharp, firsthand
insight into the tragedies that were occurring in the South. Still
today, Northup's story is widely studied and reprinted, giving its
readers a glimpse into a painful part of our country's past.
Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is
a new series of essential literary works. It features literary phenomena
with influence and themes so great that, after their publication, they
changed literature forever. From the musings of literary geniuses like
Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking
personal narrative of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our
history through the words of the exceptional few.
