Solomon Northup (ca 1807/1808-ca 1864). Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup. Auburn, NY, Buffalo, NY, and London: Derby and Miller, Derby, Orton and Mulligan, and Sampson Low, Son & Company, 1853. 12mo. Frontispiece portrait and 6 plates. Original brown cloth, spine gilt-lettered. First edition, "Twenty-Second Thousand". Sabin 55847.

Provenance: "Norm Davis July 27 1871" inscribed to front free endpaper.

The memoir of Solomon Northup. A free-born African American, he was drugged and kidnapped in Washington, D.C. before being transported to New Orleans and sold into enslavement. Published during the first year of his regained freedom, the narrative was hugely popular. The first edition was reprinted several times with three additional editions by 1859. The basis of the film of the same name which won the Best Picture Academy Award in 2013.

Condition: wear to extremities, light staining to front board.

[African Americana, African American History, Black History, Slavery, Abolition, Enslavement, Emancipation, Thirteenth Amendment, XIIth Amendment, Books, Slave Narratives, Ephemera, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Civil War, Union, Confederate]