Walking Dead Wiki

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Walking Dead Wiki
This article is about the Novel Series character. For other pages with the same name, see: Harlan

Are the dead things like playing out some weird, fucked-up, trippy evolutionary thing?
―Harlan speculating about the walkers' patterns of behavior.[src]

Harlan Steagal is a survivor of the outbreak in Thomas Dunne Books' The Walking Dead. He is described as "a nerdy grad student with thick horn-rims". He holds nightly campfire discussions in tent city.

Pre-Apocalypse[]

Athens, Georgia[]

Nothing is known about Harlan's life prior to or as the outbreak began, except that he was a grad student from Athens.

Post-Apocalypse[]

Tent City[]

At some point early on in the outbreak, Harlan found and became a settler in tent city.

The Road to Woodbury[]

"Red Day Rising"[]

Each night Harlan begins holding philosophy salons around the campfire along with half a dozen or so social misfits living in the settlement. High on pseudoephedrine, instant coffee, and bad weed, Harlan and the group theorize about various questions such as the origins of the plague, the future of mankind, and the walkers' patterns of behavior. The consensus is that there are only two possibilities: (a) zombies have no instinct, purpose, or behavioral pattern other than feeding. Or (b) there is a complex pattern of behavior that no survivor has figured out yet.

On November 2nd, Harlan joins many of the other able bodied survivors in tent city on a run to gather firewood for the settlement. While he's away, tent city is attacked by over two dozen walkers and sixteen survivors are killed. The next day a funeral is held which Harlan and the seventy-two other settlers of tent city (excluding Lilly and Chad) attend.

It is unknown what happened to Harlan after tent city was destroyed by walkers and engulfed by flames. Lilly's group speculate that it is very unlikely there were any survivors.

Killed Victims[]

This list shows the victims Harlan has killed:

  • Possibly numerous counts of zombies

Appearances[]

Novel Series[]

The Road to Woodbury[]

Trivia[]

  • He shares his surname with James Steagal, though it is unlikely that they are related.
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