Ernest Albert Pons is a Holocaust survivor with an unusual coping mechanism: he lives in the delusion that he is, in fact, Edgar Allan Poe. His psychiatrist Dupin (chosen because he shares a name with Poe's fictional detective) has a radical idea for treatment: Pons must see for himself that he is not Poe by retracing the poet's steps and writing an analysis of his life. As Pons pursues Poe from his childhood and university years in Virginia to his adult life in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, we gradually learn the secrets of both men's pasts. But when Pons begins to suspect Dupin may be engineering an elaborate scheme to kill him, is it just another part of his delusion, or is Dupin plotting a macabre twist worthy of Poe?

A wholly unique book that manages to blend seamlessly a page-turning mystery with an important work of Poe criticism and biography, The Facts in the Case of E. A. Poe (1979) was widely acclaimed on its initial publication and returns to print in this new edition, which includes a new introduction by Andrew Sinclair.