Solomon Northup (1808–1863) was a farmer, professional musician, American abolitionist, and author of the memoir, Twelve Years a Slave. Born in New York, Northup was raised a free man. A married landowner with three children, he worked as a carpenter and violinist when he was conned into accepting a job as a musician with a traveling circus. Drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, Northup finally regained his freedom twelve years later with the help of the governor of New York. After the publication of his bestselling memoir, Northup lectured about slavery throughout the Northeast and aided fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad during the Civil War.

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TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE

SOLOMON NORTHUP was a free man kidnapped into slavery in Washington, D.C., in 1841. Shortly after his escape, he published his memoirs to great acclaim and brought legal action against his abductors, though they were never prosecuted. The details of his life thereafter are unknown, but he is believed to have died in Glen Falls, New York, around 1863.

IRA BERLIN is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He has written broadly on the history of the larger Atlantic world, especially on African and African American slavery and freedom. His many books include The Making of African America, Slaves Without Masters, Generations of Captivity, and Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is editor in chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center and TheRoot.com, and host of Faces of America (PBS). He is general editor for a Penguin Classics series of African American works, including The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt, edited with an introduction by William L. Andrews; God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson, with a foreword by Maya Angelou; Iola Leroy by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, with an introduction by Hollis Robbins; and