Twelve Years a Slave (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Born in 1808, Solomon Northup lived the life of a free man and educated tradesman in New York. He was early acquainted with voting and civic life through his father. Like his father, he maintained a cordial relationship with the white family that had previously held his own family in bondage, an association that would help secure his freedom. Northup and his wife, Anne Hampton Northup, were engaged in a quintessentially American quest for social and economic advancement when he was enticed away from the safety of Saratoga Springs, New York, with the promise of work and kidnapped into slavery in 1841.

Rebecka Rutledge Fisher is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She teaches courses in African American Literature and literary theory. Her work includes studies of W.E.B. Du Bois, Olaudah Equiano, Frances E.W. Harper, and Richard Wright. She is the author of Habitations of the Veil: Metaphor and the Poetics of Being in African American Literature, and she has edited Equiano’s Interesting Narrative for Barnes and Noble Press.