Early Life and Writing Career
Irving grew up in New York City, New York, United States, North America, the son of Dorothy and Jay Irving, a Collier's cover artist and the creator of the syndicated comic strip Pottsy. After graduating in 1947 from Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Irving attended Cornell University, graduated with honors in English, 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. On Ibiza, he met an Englishwoman, Claire Lydon, and they married in 1958, moving to California, where she died at Big Sur in an automobile accident. Irving later married English author Maureen "Moish" Earl from 1984 to 1998 while living much of the time in the mountain town of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.
Irving's third novel, The Valley, is a Western, published by McGraw-Hill in 1960. In 1962, after a year spent traveling around the world and living in a houseboat in Kashmir, Irving moved back to Ibiza with his third wife, English photographic model Fay Brooke, and their newborn son, Josh. This marriage ended in divorce. In 1967, he married Swiss/German artist Edith Sommer, and they had two sons, John Edmond (aka "Nedsky") and Barnaby. On Ibiza he was friendly with Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory and was asked by De Hory to write his biography, Fake! (1969). Irving and de Hory are both featured in Orson Welles's documentary F for Fake (1974).
Read more about this topic: Clifford Irving
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, writing and/or career:
“Our bad neighbor makes us early stirrers,
Which is both healthful and good husbandry.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I have given the best of myself and the best work of my life to help obtain political freedom for women, knowing that upon this rests the hope not only of the freedom of men but of the onward civilization of the world.”
—Mary S. Anthony (1827–1907)
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)