Solomon Northup was a free Black man - a husband, father, and musician living in upstate New York - when two men offered him a short-term job and drugged him instead. He woke up in chains in Washington, D.C., and spent the next twelve years enslaved on Louisiana plantations, surviving by concealing his education and waiting for one chance to get word to anyone who could prove who he really was. Northup wrote it all down himself within a year of his rescue, while every detail was still raw.One of the most important firsthand accounts of American slavery ever published - a legally corroborated memoir that reads like a thriller because every page of it actually happened.