Clifford Michael Irving (born November 5, 1930) is an American investigative reporter and author of best-selling novels and works of nonfiction, but best known for his hoax "autobiography" of reclusive and eccentric businessman Howard Hughes in the early 1970s. After Hughes denounced him and sued McGraw-Hill, the publisher, Irving confessed the hoax and was subsequently sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison, serving 17 months.

Irving grew up in New York City, the son of Dorothy and Jay Irving, a Collier's cover artist and the creator of the syndicated comic strip Pottsy, about a fat and friendly New York City policeman. 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. He led an adventurous life, basing himself for many years on the then relatively unknown Spanish Mediterranean island of Ibiza. In 1957, he sailed on a three-masted schooner from Mexico to France; in 1958, he spent many months in Marrakech and Fes working on a CBC-BBC documentary film production about vanishing aspects of Moroccan culture. On Ibiza, he met an Englishwoman, Claire Lydon, and they married in 1958, moving to California, where she was tragically killed at Big Sur, while shopping, in an automobile accident. Irving was later married to 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.

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world. He gained prominence from the late 1920s as a maverick film producer, making big-budget and often controversial films like The Racket (1928), Hell's Angels (1930), Scarface (1932), and The Outlaw (1943). Hughes was one of the most influential aviators in history; he set multiple world air-speed records, built the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 "Hercules" (better known to history as the "Spruce Goose" aircraft), and acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines which would later on merge with American Airlines. Hughes is also remembered for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life, caused in part by a worsening obsessive–compulsive disorder and chronic pain. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Hughes' birthplace is recorded as either Humble or Houston, Texas. The date is also uncertain, though Hughes claimed his birthday was Christmas Eve. A 1941 affidavit birth certificate of Hughes signed by his aunt Annette Gano Lummis and Estelle Boughton Sharp states he was born on December 24, 1905, in Harris County, Texas. However, his baptismal record of October 7, 1906, in the parish register of St. John's Episcopal Church, in Keokuk, Iowa, has his birth listed as September 24, 1905, without reference to the place of birth.