You can re-contextualize the episode as an exercise in myth-making or performance art, à la Laura Albert. Albert published the first of two works of wild-side “autobiographical” fiction under the name JT LeRoy, who was said to be a prostitute’s heroin-addicted son recovering from a childhood of abuse, and got a sister-in-law to wear shades and a bottle-blond wig to pose as LeRoy. Madonna, Courtney Love, Lou Reed, and Gus Van Sant were taken in—until the scam was exposed by New York magazine in 2005. (A recent documentary depicts Albert as a boundary-breaking artist working the frontiers of truth and fiction in order to deal with issues from her own troubled childhood, which included a period spent in a group home.)

Why do writers fake it in the first place? And, once snared in their own web of untruths, why do they continue?

Dr. Ronald Schouten, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who directs the Law & Psychiatry Service of the Massachusetts General Hospital, distinguishes between the “garden variety” liar, who lies to gain personal advantage, and the pathological one, whose lies are so unlikely that you can’t figure out why he’s lying. This latter breed is a narcissist, Schouten says, and he comes in two types: the one who lies to put himself in the best possible light, and the one who, like an entertainer, lies to gain and hold the attention of an audience, delighting in its reaction from one astonishment to the next.

That sounds about right. But what pushes the literary liar over the line? Some writers, it appears, are full of self-loathing or unsure of their talent, possibly wanting to fail so spectacularly that they’ll finally receive the punishment they deserve. Others, having long sought to please a perfectionist loved one, may be doing the same on the page, creating an impossibly perfect literary world out of whole cloth. Still others may be caught up in the very audacity that stirs a person to become a writer in the first place. More than other creative people, writers make work out of the intangible and insubstantial: the thin air of spoken language, the tiny shapes on page and screen. A writer makes something out of nothing, and a literary fake is, to some degree, merely too much of nothing.

Writers make shit up, most of them scarcely acknowledging the grandiosity of the undertaking. But rare is the maker-upper who is openly grandiose going in, who sets out determined to put one over on his audience for the sheer fun of it—the way Clifford Irving did.

“If fools did not go to market, there would be no cracked pots for sale,” so said Jean le Malchanceux, 12-century French philosophe.

Malchanceux did not exist: he was the invention of some writers living on Ibiza in the early 1970s. Whenever one of them finished a book, he would cook up a soggy epigraph and attribute it to Jean Malchanceux: literally John Luckless. It was their way to wrinkle the starched shirts of those poor sots stuck in publishing offices in Manhattan while they were living the good life on Ibiza, eating fresh fish and watching the sun set on the Mediterranean.

That’s the spirit in which Irving, while living in Ibiza in 1971, concocted a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire tycoon. Irving, a Manhattan-born author of three novels that had sold poorly, saw it as a low-risk, high-adrenaline stunt, a kick at the pricks of New York literary society. It was the kind of thing a writer could try and hope to get away with in the days before the Internet laid all—or most—fraudsters bare. That “stunt” turned Irving into the Leif Erikson of literary hoaxsters. (The forged Hitler Diaries would not appear until the 1980s.) Irving got advances upward of $750,000 from McGraw-Hill; fooled the publisher, handwriting experts, and Life magazine’s editors; and stirred the publicity-loathing Hughes to comment—all of which seems to surprise him even now. “I was a writer, not a hoaxer. As a writer, you are constantly pushing the envelope, testing what people will believe, and once you get going you say, ‘They believed that; maybe they’ll believe this . . .’ ” Irving is 86, tall and strapping. After living for years outside Aspen, he sold his library in a yard sale and moved to Sarasota, where he lives in a rented house on Phillippi Creek with his wife—his sixth. Gone is the $300,000 movie payout for his memoir of the episode; so is the half a million dollars–plus that Irving says Simon & Schuster chief Michael Korda paid him for two courtroom novels that stiffed. But Irving is doing all right for a writer whose best-known book wasn’t published—and so couldn’t be read—for 40 years after he wrote it. The rented house has a pool and a lush natural garden. He tootles around in Gulf Coast regalia: T-shirt, shorts, ball cap, a day’s growth of gray beard. The day I visit, we get sandwiches from a New York–style deli he frequents, settle in a living room decorated with his paintings of Ibiza, and then this man, who once played fast and loose with Howard Hughes’s story, tells me of all the things that the filmmakers got wrong in the 2006 movie of his story: The Hoax, starring Richard Gere.