In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free black man living in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., fell for a fake job offer from two men who lured him to Washington, D.C., drugged him and beat him unconscious, then sold him into slavery in the South. 12 Years a Slave, the motion picture based on Northup’s memoir of the same name, opens in theaters around the country on Friday, to glowing reviews.
Audiences hungry for more can turn to the first comprehensive biography of Northup, published by Praeger in August. Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave, covers his childhood as the son of a former slave turned farmer, his enslavement, and his subsequent life as an abolitionist and public figure.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was a history consultant to the movie and has vouched for its faithfulness to the memoir—telling Mother Jones magazine, “I’m not the kind of scholar who confuses a feature film with a documentary"—has high praise for the new book. It manages to “set as much of the record straight as can be set straight,” he wrote online at the Root, and is “the best current biography available.”
As far as the authors know, it’s the only biography, aside from brief ones provided in essays and introductions to editions of the memoir (one of which, from Penguin, was edited by Mr. Gates).
The project began with a study of Northup that David A. Fiske, a former senior librarian at the New York State Library, self-published last year. He had been corresponding with two academics who had long been interested in Northup’s story, even though they were not historians themselves: Clifford W. Brown Jr., a professor of government at Union College, in New York, and Rachel Seligman, an assistant curator with the Tang Teaching Museum, at Skidmore College. They had met Mr. Fiske at an exhibit mounted at Union in 1999 while Mr. Brown led the college’s exhibits committee.
The acquaintanceship has resulted in a book that combines all their work on Northup, to produce a richer account. It incorporates, for example, extensive on-the-ground research that Mr. Brown undertook into the geography of Northup’s kidnapping, sale, and removal to the South and the later, ultimately unsuccessful prosecution of his two kidnappers.
“We all added to each other’s work,” says Mr. Brown, adding that he is a longtime Northup enthusiast even though his research and teaching specialties are the American presidency and campaign financing.
The biography is intended as a companion to Northup’s memoir, which was published in 1853 and sold 30,000 copies in three years. Today it is a key text in African-American studies, but it is not widely known outside academe.
The feature film will probably ensure that it receives fresh attention. Directed by an English filmmaker, Steve McQueen, the movie stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, a prominent English actor, as Northup. Perhaps predictably, it enlists a Hollywood star, Brad Pitt, to play—for just eight minutes of screen time—a white carpenter who helps Northup to freedom.
The movie has been described by The Guardian and Time magazine as “stark, visceral, and unrelenting” and “not just a great film but a necessary one,” by a director who is “not a schlockmeister sensationalist but a remorseless artist.” The New Yorker’s film critic, David Denby, called it “easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery.”
The authors of Solomon Northup may not get as much press, but they believe that their book provides a good response when Northup’s memoir, like many slave narratives, is criticized by readers who doubt its claims. With his and his colleagues’ investigation of Northup’s life complete, Mr. Brown can say: “I have yet to see any challenge to any of the factual undertakings in Northup’s book that hold water.”
