Twelve Years a Slave. Cet article n’est pas disponible.Twelve Years a Slave

This Norton Critical Edition of Solomon Northup’s harrowing autobiography is based on the 1853 first edition. It is accompanied by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s introduction and detailed explanatory footnotes.

This 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. MacMahon; A Genealogy of Secondary Sources (1880—2014) presents twenty-three voices spanning three centuries on the memoir’s major themes. Contributors include George Washington Williams, Marion Wilson Starling, Kenneth Stampp, Robert B. Stepto, Trish Loughran and David Fiske, Clifford W. Brown, Jr., and Rachel Seligman, among others.

The 2013 film adaptation—12 Years a Slave—is fully considered, with criticism and major reviews of the film as well as Henry Louis Gates's three interviews with its director, Steve McQueen. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Solomon Northup was a free man living and working in New York in the years before the Civil War. He was kidnapped and enslaved in 1841 and freed twelve years later in 1853. He lived the rest of his life as a free man, but the date and nature of his death are to this day unknown.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Ph.D.Cambridge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard University. He is the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race with Cornel West; Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. His is also the writer, producer, and narrator of PBS documentaries Finding Your Roots; Black in Latin America; Faces of America; African American Lives 1 and 2; Looking for Lincoln; America Beyond the Color Line; and Wonders of the African World. He is the editor of African American National Biography with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Dictionary of African Biography with Anthony Appiah; Encyclopedia Africana with Anthony Appiah; and The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, as well as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com.