Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup (Annotated Edition)

Twelve Years a Slave is the memoir of Solomon Northup, an unfastened black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Published in 1853, the equal year wherein he was liberated, it covers his twelve years in servitude.Northup recounts his life starting in New York, establishing his beginning and his reputation as a loose guy living inside the North together with his circle of relatives. He then stocks the information surrounding his kidnapping and reviews within the slave...
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Twelve Years a Slave is the memoir of Solomon Northup, an unfastened black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Published in 1853, the equal year wherein he was liberated, it covers his twelve years in servitude.Northup recounts his life starting in New York, establishing his beginning and his reputation as a loose guy living inside the North together with his circle of relatives. He then stocks the information surrounding his kidnapping and reviews within the slave marketplace, and the subsequent years of captivity and enslavement he endures till he steps onto free soil once more twelve years later. Through his tale of plight, Northup describes the day by day interactions between him, other slaves, and the numerous masters he works beneath, in addition to specific and great information of agricultural practices and southern customs - shedding extra mild on slavery than any textbook can.The memoir is dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose fictional narrative, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was published best twelve months in advance. Critics have observed Northup's tale bears many similarities to Stowe's, including the condemnation of the felony machine itself in place of man or woman slave owners, in addition to the shared setting of the novels. The e-book of Twelve Years a Slave helped verify the fictional, albeit correct, words of Stowe concerning the institution of slavery.Northup enlisted David Wilson, an antislavery editor, as his amanuensis. Scholars have debated how a good deal of the work was written with the aid of Wilson, however most seem to agree that Northup supplied the statistics and did certainly play a large position in its writing.Twelve Years a Slave turned into a bestseller, with 25,000 copies bought in its first two years. Subsequent versions have been published as well, however the paintings fell into obscurity until 1930, whilst a younger lady named Sue Eakin discovered a duplicate of the narrative in a plantation residence and then for sale in a nearby bookstore. Intrigued, particularly while the bookseller claimed it become natural fiction, she pursued the entirety she ought to locate approximately Northup, in the end corroborating his narrative in several methods and bringing it again into the general public area. While not as extensively study because the Narrative of Frederick Douglass or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, it affords an outlook essential to the national debate main to the Civil War in addition to an information of a brutal but giant issue of American records.Notably, British director Steve McQueen tailored the paintings into an Academy-Award-triumphing film in 2014.