Twelve Years a Slave

By: Solomon Northup

Narrated by: Louis Gossett Jr.

Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Official Movie Tie-in Audiobook for the Academy Award's Best Picture and Golden Globe's Best Drama winner.

New York Times and USA Today Bestseller.

In this riveting landmark autobiography which reads like a novel, Academy Award and Emmy winner Louis Gossett, Jr., masterfully transports us to 1840s New York, Washington, D.C., and Louisiana to experience the kidnapping and twelve years of bondage of Solomon Northup, a free man of color. Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853, was an immediate bombshell in the national debate over slavery leading up to the Civil War. It validated Harriett Beecher Stowe’s fictional account of Southern slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had become the best-selling American book in history a few years earlier and significantly changed public opinion in favor of abolition. Experience our official movie tie-in audiobook for the award-winning motion picture, directed by Steve McQueen and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Brad Pitt, Paul Giamatti, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyong'o. This audio edition with an accompanying custom map is based on the research of Dr. Sue Eakin, the nationally recognized authority on Solomon Northup who spent a lifetime authenticating his story.

Hard working Solomon Northup, an educated free man of color in 1841, enjoys family life with his wife and three children in Saratoga, New York. He delights his community with his fiddle playing and antic spirit, and has positive expectations of all he meets. When he is deceived by “circus promoters” to accompany them to a musical gig in the nation’s capital, his joyful life takes an unimaginable turn. He awakens in shackles to find he has been drugged, kidnapped and bound for the slave block in D.C.

After Solomon is shipped 1,000 miles to New Orleans, he is assigned his slave name and quickly learns that the mere utterance of his true origin or rights as a freeman are certain to bring severe punishment or death. While he endures the brutal life of a slave in Louisiana’s isolated Bayou Boeuf plantation country, he must learn how to play the system and plot his escape home.

For 12 years, his fine mind captures the reality of slavery in stunning detail, as we learn about the characters that populate plantation society and the intrigues of the bayou – from the collapse of a slave rebellion resulting in mass hangings due to traitorous slave Lew Cheney, to the tragic abuse of his friend Patsey because of Mrs. Epps’ jealousy of her husband’s sexual exploitation of his pretty young slave.

When Solomon finally finds a sympathizing friend who risks his life to secret a letter to the North, a courageous rescue attempt ensues that could either compound Solomon’s suffering, or get him back to the arms of his family.

AUTHENTICATION: Northup’s harrowing first-hand account was authenticated from decades of research by Dr. Sue Eakin, who rediscovered the original narrative as a 12-year old in 1931 and made it her life’s work.

For additional audio clips, background info and images, see our website at www.12YearsASlaveBook.com.

Download your unique free map based on Solomon's narrative.

©2013 Eakin Films & Publishing (P)2013 Eakin Films & Publishing

Critic reviews

“...Gossett infuses the words with a quiet, seething power." ( AudioFile, 2013)

“I can never read his account of his days in slavery, of his independence of spirit, of his determination to be free…without believing that it would make a difference in today's world if our contemporaries knew of such a man as Solomon Northup." (Dr. John Hope Franklin, past president of the American Historical Association, best-selling author, recipient of Presidential Medal of Freedom, nation's highest civilian honor)

"[T]he extraordinary narrative of Solomon Northup is the most remarkable book that was ever issued from the American press." ( Detroit Tribune, original 1853 review) "Its truth is far greater than fiction." (Frederick Douglass, famous writer, former slave and abolitionist) "It will be read extensively, both at the North and the South." ( New York Tribune, 1853, published by Horace Greeley)

The most amazing book I have ever read.

I loved it! I was deeply saddened, deeply moved, and deeply impacted to examine the course of my life in light of the atrocities suffered by my ancestors.

A Better Man than I

Any additional comments?

I purchased this audiobook because of the movie adaptation. It was very difficult to listen to at times, and I was glad I didn't have to watch some of the scenes (I will not be watching the movie). Normally my imagination is more creative than any film director could replicate (why I love books), but thankfully I was fairly successful at suppressing it in this case.

The facts of slavery were not a surprise. Hearing them narrated was certainly more harrowing than reading about them, and for that reason I consider the audiobook a far better way to encounter this piece of our American history than the printed book. Lou Gossett Jr. did a fine job.

What really struck me throughout the book was the charity of the author. His ability to understand and forgive those who have wronged him filled me with admiration, but also shame, because it was very obvious that my own ability to forgive is sorely lacking in comparison.

Mandatory Reading

I often think some books that cover historical times should be mandatory reading for our children. This is absolutely one of those books.

An autobiographical account of slavery.

An amazing , true story. A very happy and relieved Solomon Northup in the end but one still feels for those slaves that never got the chance of freedom. Even more astonding how the book was forgotten for many years..

Do we ever really know who we rub shoulders with?

When will we allow one another to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? This poor man's capture and torment is well written and pursuasive. No wonder it wasn't popular in its time.

Powerful on every level.

First of all, the account of slave life in this book is remarkable. Free from the gloss of historical fiction, it just lays out the hard, cold facts. The description of daily life is beyond anything I'd ever imagined. The word "horrific" doesn't even begin to describe it. Second, there is Solomon Northup's way of dealing with life and mankind. I simply cannot imagine being dealt those cards and responding with even a tenth of his dignity. Third ... it's impossible not to admire Northup's writing ability and his wonderful vocabulary. I was charmed by him.

I am awed by the men and women who had the strength of mind to endure. And I'm grateful for the brave souls who had the conviction to deal with slavery - often in personal ways and at great risk - and to help when they could. This book had a way of really personalizing that work and making its importance so clear.

The narration fits this book perfectly. I heard Solomon Northup telling his story - exactly as it should be. It is a tough listen at times, but powerful and very real. Highly recommended.

Outstanding Work Non Fiction

A first hand account of life as it was in that time in history. The untiring voice of Louis Gossett Jr. brings to life the words of the author.

A Great Reading of an Important and Powerful Book

In the beginning of Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Solomon Northrup says that he'll recount the period from 1841 to 1853 when he lived as a slave in Louisiana after having been born free and grown up and married and made a family in that condition in New York. His object is "to give a candid and truthful statement of facts: to repeat the story of my life, without exaggeration, leaving it for others to determine, whether even the pages of fiction present a picture of more cruel wrong or a severer bondage." After sketching his family history, Northrup depicts how he was lured away from home with promises of a lucrative gig playing the violin, only to be drugged, kidnapped, beaten, and sold into slavery. Then the bulk of his narrative concerns the highlights (wrong word) of his twelve years as a slave.

Northrup tells us much about the "peculiar institution" in Louisiana: how slaves earned a little money to buy "extras" like pans, tobacco, ribbons, and hats; how they spent their only holiday (a few days at Christmastime); how they were fed just enough bacon (often rancid or wormy) and cornmeal to keep them hungry; how they worked from sunrise to nightfall (and to midnight under full moons) with only a ten-minute break for lunch; how they were whipped for resting during work or for not filling their cotton quotas or for various other infractions; how drivers drove their fellow slaves to work fast enough; how slaves were forbidden to learn to swim or to read and write; how they married with the only "ceremony" being asking the master's permission; and so on.

The book is absorbing, appalling, and moving. Even when Northrup details the methods of cultivating and picking cotton and raising and processing sugar cane, the book is clear and interesting. It's also suspenseful. Although we know from the start that Northrup will find his way back home to freedom and family after twelve years, we do not know how he will accomplish that, and we do not know what physical and emotional torments he will be subjected to before that, and we do not know which of his fellow slaves will be raped, flogged, sold, or killed. And his mostly calm tone makes the abuse he and other slaves suffer all the more horrifying.

The most devastating part of his book is not Northrup's enslavement, but that of Patsey, the young, vibrant, top cotton-picking slave on Epps' plantation who is routinely raped by Epps and tormented by his vindictive wife for it (because she cannot punish her husband). Patsey is literally excoriated with floggings that flay her back and spirit. Northrup tries to the limits of a slave to shield her from master and mistress (telling Mrs. Epps that it's her husband's fault and refusing to obey her when she tells him to kill Patsey and dump her body in the swamps), but Epps makes Northrup flog her once, and the scene when he is finally free to go home, and leaves her, and she plaintively says, "I'm glad you're goin' to be free--but oh! de Lord, de Lord! what'll become of me?" is heart-breaking.

Northrup's story vividly demonstrates that slavery was a terrible injustice festering in the USA. Even when treated "well," slaves would prefer freedom to bondage, and the fact that they were forced to work for the benefit of others and were denied education and self-improvement and were subject to the whims of their owners rendered the whole system pernicious. But he also asserts that there were good-hearted masters as well as heartless ones, and that both were products of their culture: "It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel,” he says, “so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives.”

One part of Northrup's narrative that rings especially true involves his honest accounts of his unheroic actions. He fears too much the risk to try to escape or to tell his Louisiana masters that he'd been born free; he does his job as driver well enough to avoid being punished by Epps; he whips Patsey to avoid bringing Epps' wrath down on his own head; and so on. That is, although he depicts how capable he is in playing the violin and making things like an axe haft, a loom, and a fish trap, he presents himself as a human being rather than a saint.

Although the Eakin Films audiobook provides "An Afterword on the Rediscovery of Twelve Years a Slave by Dr. Sue Eakin" (read by her), it leaves out the "Editor's Preface" revealing that Northrup didn't write his autobiographical account, but rather dictated it to a white lawyer, David Wilson, who then wrote it in consultation with Northrup, who corrected many details to make it more accurate. Anyway, Northrup-Wilson is a fine writer, telling the story vividly and literately. Here is some of their prose in a particularly painful moment:

“As soon as he was gone I threw the letter in the fire, and, with a desponding and despairing heart, beheld the epistle which had cost me so much anxiety and thought, and which I fondly hoped would have been my forerunner to the land of freedom, writhe and shrivel on its bed of coals, and dissolve into smoke and ashes.”

Once or twice I was yanked out of imagining Northrup telling his own story when "he" says something like, "Lew Cheney, with whom I became acquainted--a shrewd, cunning negro, more intelligent than the generality of his race, but unscrupulous and full of treachery. . ." Or when "he" waxes a wee bit too complimentary about a "good" master/mistress.

However, the feeling that Northrup is telling his story by himself is usually easy to maintain, due to Louis Gossett Jr.'s wonderful reading of the audiobook. His savory voice has a nasal and gravel quality and a sensitivity that suits the material without any melodramatic, actorly changes for different characters. I listened to the samples of eight other audiobooks of the novel and found Gossett's the best.

Anyone interested in an informative and powerful first-hand account of the institution that still scars America should read Twelve Years a Slave.

Heartbreaking true story.

What did you love best about Twelve Years a Slave?

Mr. Northup was careful to remind his readers that he was writing only from his own experiences and not from what he had heard from others. He was an impressive gentleman.
Mr. Gossett did a wonderful job in his narration. He made you believe that it was actually Mr. Northup telling the story.

Horrifying and captivating

At times both horrifying and unbelievable, this is the true story of Solomon Northrop, a free man living in New York in the 1840s. He is kidnapped and sold into slavery, beginning a 12 year adventure of Southern slavery during this time.
Follow Solomon (or Platt as he becomes known) through his travels, masters good and evil. All documented after he returns home.
A great listen, sometimes hard to listen to, but a sometimes painful glimpse into our history.
Well worth the read.