Irving grew up in New York City, the son of Dorothy and Jay Irving, a magazine cover artist and the creator of the syndicated comic strip
Pottsy, about a New York policeman. After graduating in 1947 from Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Irving attended Cornell University, had a two-year marriage (to Nina Wilcox) 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. While living on the island of Ibiza, he met an Englishwoman, Claire Lydon, and they married in 1958, moving to California. She was killed in Big Sur in an automobile accident.
On a Darkling Plain and
The Losers were not financially successful but received excellent reviews.
On a Darkling Plain was sometimes compared with another novel set at Cornell, Charles Thompson's
Halfway Down the Stairs (1957). John O. Lyons, in an addendum to his 1962 survey "The College Novel in America: 1962-1974" (
Critique, 1974), saw a tendency toward pranks and put-ons in Irving's early work (a critical analysis Irving dismissed as "nonsense"):
Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966) continues the iconoclastic Cornell Bildungsroman of the fifties by Clifford Irving, On a Darkling Plain (1956); Charles Thompson, Halfway Down the Stairs (1957); and Robert Gutwillig, After Long Silence (1958). The oscillation between Weltschmerz and pranks in these novels was undoubtedly an influence on "The Whole Sick Crew" of Pynchon's V.
Irving's third novel,
The Valley, is a mythic Western, published by McGraw-Hill in 1960. In 1962, Irving moved back to Ibiza with his third wife, English model Fay Brooke, and their newborn son, Josh. In 1967, he married Swiss/German artist Edith Sommer, and they had two sons, Nedsky and Barnaby. On Ibiza he was friendly with 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).