'Thirty Years a Slave' was an autobiography written by Louis Hughes. He was born in 1832 to a white plantation owner and black slave in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was enslaved for over thirty years, spending most of that time in Tennessee. During that time, he learned in secret how to read and write. Thirty-three years after gaining freedom at the end of the Civil War, he wrote his memoir Thirty Years a Slave, published in 1897. It is considered an essential text for understanding the experience of slavery in western Tennessee.