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).
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