Clifford Michael Irving (born November 5, 1930) is an American writer, best known for using forged letters to trick a publisher into accepting a fake "autobiography" of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes in the early 1970s. After Hughes denounced him and sued the publisher, Irving confessed the hoax and was subsequently sentenced to two and a half years in prison, yet he served only seventeen months.
Irving grew up in New York City, the son of D...
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Clifford Michael Irving (born November 5, 1930) is an American writer, best known for using forged letters to trick a publisher into accepting a fake "autobiography" of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes in the early 1970s. After Hughes denounced him and sued the publisher, Irving confessed the hoax and was subsequently sentenced to two and a half years in prison, yet he served only seventeen months.
Irving grew up in New York City, the son of Dorothy and Jay Irving, a magazine cover artist and the creator of the syndicated comic strip Pottsy, about a New York policeman. After graduating in 1947 from Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Irving attended Cornell University, had a two-year marriage (to Nina Wilcox) and worked on his first novel, On a Darkling Plain (Putnam, 1956) while he was a copy boy at The New York Times. He completed his second novel, The Losers (1958), as he traveled about Europe. While living on the island of Ibiza he met an Englishwoman, Claire Lydon, and...
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