12 Years a Slave, Film Tie-In

From Steve McQueen, the critically acclaimed director of Shame, comes a film adaptation of Solomon Northup's bestselling memoir, 12 Years a Slave, a vivid and detailed account of his twelve-year enslavement on a series of Louisiana cotton plantations in the mid-1800s. Coming to theaters nationwide from Fox Searchlight this October, this highly anticipated film is expected to be a big awards contender for 2013, and will lead an entirely new audience to read Northup¿s vivid masterpiece. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti, Lupita Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt, and Alfre Woodard, this tie-in edition features a foreword from acclaimed director Steve McQueen. Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave.