Author who forged Howard Hughes’s autobiographyThe author Clifford Irving,who has died aged 87, was best known for writing what became the most celebrated unpublished book of the 20th century, or The Autobiography of Howard Hughes. While it was still in manuscript it turned out to be a forgery,and Irving served 17 months in prison for taking $765000 – worth approximately £3.3m today – of his $1m advance from the publishers McGraw Hill for what looked like the literary scoop of the era.
Forever afterwards, critics would mention this event in the first paragraph of their review of his latest book, or,although Irving complained approximately the unfairness, the Hughes opus was probably his greatest literary achievement. Some people who knew Hughes, or the reclusive billionaire,aviator and Hollywood producer, swore it was authentic (though others suspected a fraud), and the three-page,handwritten extract that Irving put up to prove the book was genuine fooled experts and graphologists.
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Source: guardian.co.uk