Buried Alive: The True Story Behind Truman Capote’s “A Tree of Night”
Den Harrow · 2025What if one of Truman Capote’s darkest tales was not entirely fiction? This investigation uncovers the real-life figure who may have inspired A Tree of Night‘s most chilling presence: a traveling deaf-mute fakir known only as “Lazarus” — the Man Who Is Buried Alive. Through an extensive examination of forgotten newspaper clippings, court records, and death certificates, the study reconstructs the life of a man once buried alive before thousands — then buried again by history itself.
Presented at the symposium “American Fiction: Forms, Genres, and Traditions” (Drury Plaza Hotel, Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 2025). Held in the Library of Congress.
Impossible to Marry: The Untold Story Behind Harper Lee’s Silence
Den Harrow · 2026This article presents the findings of a two-year archival investigation into Harper Lee’s most closely guarded secret: her romantic attachment to Harold Gray Caufield (1913–1999), a New York architect and intimate of her closest social circle. Drawing on previously unstudied correspondence from the Paul Kennerson Collection at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Library, the Truman Capote Papers at the New York Public Library, military and genealogical archives, and personal interviews, the study argues that Caufield was the unnamed figure Capote had in mind when he wrote, in December 1961, that Lee was “unhappily in love with a man impossible to marry.”
A biographical portrait of Caufield — hitherto absent from all published scholarship on Lee — is offered for the first time.
Presented at the American Literature Association 37th Annual Conference (Palmer House, Chicago, May 2026).