Twelve Years a Slave is Solomon Northup's memoir of his time enslaved after being kidnapped from his home state of New York. It was a best-seller at the time, selling over 25,000 copies, and was part of the canon of books, both true and fictional, that advocated for the abolition of slavery by unmasking its horrors.
Other notable true accounts include Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative, or Harriet Ann Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Collectively these are known as slave narratives, but also fall into the genre of memoir. They are related to the genre of protest novel; one of the most significant...
