John Evangelist Walsh is one of America's most distinguished historians, gifted with an ability to make his mountains of research flow into narratives that entertain as well as inform. He often makes his work seem like adventures in which exciting discoveries are to be made. Like Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, his Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution is another investigation of a real-life mystery. Midnight Dreary is Walsh's second book about the famous American poet. His 1967 work Poe the Detective won an Edgar (an award named for Poe) from the Mystery Writers of America.