Twelve Years a Slave: Free eBook and Audio Book of the Memoir Behind the Film (1853)

On Sun­day night, 12 Years a Slave was named best pic­ture at the 86th Acad­e­my Awards. And John Rid­ley, the film’s screen­writer, won the Oscar for best adapt­ed screen­play. Rid­ley’s screen­play was based, of course, on Twelve Years a Slave, the 1853 mem­oir by Solomon Northup. Pub­lished not long after Har­ri­et Beech­er Stowe wrote her famous nov­el about slav­ery, Uncle Tom’s Cab­in, Northup’s book became some­thing of a best­seller, sell­ing around 30,000 copies, before falling into rel­a­tive obscu­ri­ty for the next cen­tu­ry and a half. The 2013 film obvi­ous­ly put the mem­oir back into the spot­light, and it inspired some­one (we’re not sure exact­ly who) to put the book on the web in a hand­some, read­able for­mat. You can head over to 12years.org to read Northup’s dra­mat­ic per­son­al account, free online. Or find some­what less attrac­tive (though still ser­vice­able and down­load­able) ver­sions at Archive.org. For any­one inter­est­ed in down­load­ing Twelve Years a Slave as a free audio book, Lib­rivox has you cov­ered here: Free on iTunes — Free MP3 Stream/Download. Also, if you care to sign up for Audible.com’s 30-Day Free Tri­al you can down­load a ver­sion pro­fes­sion­al­ly nar­rat­ed by Louis Gos­sett Jr. at no cost. Find more details on Audi­ble’s Free Tri­al pro­gram here.

H/T @brainpicker

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