Granta 34

On a Friday afternoon in late November, George Parkman - doctor of medicine, austere tenement landlord, benevolent student of the disturbed - disappeared and was never seen again. He disappeared even though he was, at the very same time, said to be in Court Street, in Milk Street, in Blossom Street, in the Harvard Medical College, in a greengrocer's buying a lettuce. And it was also said that he was the one found in a tea-chest - cold and repellent, a headless trunk, a great mat of hair clinging to the back - murdered by a Harvard professor of chemistry. Was he? One hundred and twenty-nine years later Simon Schama sets out to discover which story, if any story, is the story of the many stories of the disappearance of Doctor George Parkman, the perfect Yankee.