Thirty Years A Slave: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Thirty Years A Slave, credited to Louis Hughes, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Thirty Years A Slave, by Louis Hughes. Read by James K. White. Louis Hughes was born a slave near Charlottesville, Virginia to a white father and a black slave woman. Throughout his life he worked mostly as a house servant, but was privy to the intimate details and workings of the entire McGee cotton plantation and empire. In Thirty Years A Slave Hughes provides vivid descriptions and explicit accounts of how the McGee plantation in Mississippi, and the McGee mansion in Tennessee functioned--accounts of the lives of the many slaves that lived, suffered and sometimes died under the cruel and unusual punishments meted out by Boss and his monstrously unstable and vindictive wife. He described the profane manner in which this peculiar institution dehumanized, on a daily basis, not only the black man but even more so the white man. Ultimately, Thirty Years A Slave is an expression of Hughes’s desire to accurately describe the nature of the influence that the institution of slavery had on this country during the two hundred plus years in which it existed here, and the influence it continues to have on the heart and soul of a post-Civil War, post-14th Amendment United States. (Introduction by James K. White)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Thirty Years A Slave
• Author credits: Louis Hughes
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 9
• Listed recording duration: 4:54:22

Catalogue topics

• biography
• history
• memoirs

Track guide

1. 01 - Preface & Chapter 1 (part 1) — 38:40
2. 02 - Chapter I (part 2) — 38:29
3. 03 - Chapter II (part 1) — 41:58
4. 04 - Chapter II (part 2) — 33:43
5. 05 - Chapter III (part 1) — 37:56
6. 06 - Chapter III (part 2) — 32:56
7. 07 - Chapter IV (part 1) — 24:52
8. 08 - Chapter IV (part 2) — 17:42
9. 09 - Chapter V — 28:11

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.