Filmatized in 2013 and the official recipient of three Oscars, Solomon Northup's powerful slave narrative 'Twelve Years a Slave' depicts Nortup's life as he is sold into slavery after having spent 32 years of his life living as a free man in New York.Working as a travelling musician, Northup goes to Washington D.C, where he is kidnapped, sent to New Orleans, and sold to a planter to suffer the relentless and brutal life of a slave. After a dozen years, Northup escapes to return to his family and pulls no punches, as he describes his fate and that of so many other black people at the time.It is a harrowing but vitally important book, even today. For further reading on this subject, try 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' by Harriet Beecher Stowe.Solomon Northup (c.1807-c.1875) was an American abolitionist and writer, best remembered for his powerful race memoir 'Twelve Years a Slave'.At the age of 32, when he was a married farmer, father-of-three, violinist and free-born man, he was kidnapped in Washington D.C and shipped to New Orleans, sold to a planter and enslaved for a dozen years.When he gained his freedom, he wrote his famous memoir and spent some years lecturing across the US,on behalf of the abolitionist movement.'Twelve Years a Slave' was published a year after 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' by Harriet Beecher Stowe and built on the anti-slavery momentum it had developed.Northup's final years are something of a mystery, though it is thought that he struggled to cope with family life after being freed.
