In 1975, NYU department chairman Mike Stein took a job in California at California State University in Long Beach, and invited Lee to join the staff there. Lee made the move in 1976. The Ninth Man was published that year by Doubleday and became a best seller. Lee soon signed a two-book contract for his next two novels. After getting straight A's in his Ph.D. course work and completing research for his dissertation (Edgar. A. poe as a Journalist), Lee decided his fiction-writing career was more important than the Ph.D. He turned over his Poe notes to his wife, who by now was teaching at California State at Northridge and had published her first novel, Hard on the Road, with Doubleday. She used the research to write her second novel, A Fever Called Living, about the last five years of Poe's life.