Howard Hughes: The Autobiography

About the Author

FOR PERPETRATING the hoax, Clifford Irving was sentenced to 2½ years in federal prison. Richard Suskind, his researcher and co-author, served five months, and Edith Irving, as a co-conspirator, was sentenced to sixty days by the U.S. courts and to one year by a Swiss tribunal.

Irving was twice transferred from prison to prison on charges of possession of contraband; at the final stop, Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in Connecticut, where he was co-chairman of the Inmate Committee, he was placed in solitary confinement and formally accused of organizing a work-stoppage and riot. When Irving demanded that lie-detector tests be given to him and his accusers, the charges against him were dropped. Twice denied parole by the Nixon administration, he finally achieved it by filing a writ in federal court against the prison authorities. He kept a prison journal; an excerpt was published in Playboy.

Freed, Irving resumed his career as a novelist, and he has since published ten books. The New York Times Book Review has called him ‘a born storyteller.’ Ernest Lehman wrote: ‘With Tom Mix and Pancho Villa, Clifford Irving takes his place among the giants of contemporary literature.’ In the Los Angeles Times, Caroline See lauded Irving as ‘a master,’ and William Safire in the New York Times called Irving’s Trial ‘the novel of the year.’ Thomas Keneally wrote: ‘In The Angel of Zin, Irving has given the concept of murder an enlarged dimension… a totally engrossing thriller.’ Donald Westlake said of Final Argument: ‘Every part of it is terrific. What a wonderful piece of storytelling.’ Booklist called The Spring ‘extraordinarily entertaining and thoughtful.’

Joseph Persico, Colin Powell’s biographer, wrote: ‘No writer today surpasses Clifford Irving in making fiction ring like truth.’ Portrayed by Richard Gere, he is the subject of the 2007 Miramax film, The Hoax; but Irving maintains that ‘The movie is itself a hoax’.

With his Australian wife he lives in Colorado and Mexico, writing and painting, although his chief preoccupation, he says, ‘is to understand some small part of the nature of existence’.