A film tie-in edition of this eloquent and powerful memoir, to accompany the major new film starring Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slaveis 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.