Howard Hughes was one of the most flamboyant and enigmatic Americans of the twentieth century — a fabulously wealthy industrialist, record-setting aviator, and Hollywood film producer whose later years dissolved into reclusive eccentricity. Heir to a fortune built on his father's invention of a revolutionary oil-drilling bit, he inherited the family company as a young man and used its wealth to pursue an extraordinary range of ambitions.
In Hollywood, Hughes produced lavish and sometimes scandalous films, including the aviation epic Hell's Angels, and consorted with the era's biggest stars. But his deepest passion was flight. A daring and skilled pilot, he designed and built advanced aircraft, set numerous speed records, and in 1938 flew around the world in record time, returning to a hero's welcome.
His business empire grew vast and varied, spanning aircraft manufacturing, the airline TWA, electronics, real estate, and Las Vegas casinos. A relentless and combative entrepreneur, he survived several near-fatal plane crashes that left him in chronic pain and may have deepened his psychological troubles.
In his later decades Hughes withdrew almost entirely from public view, becoming a phantom figure of legend — obsessed with germs, dependent on aides and drugs, and shuttling between guarded hotel suites. By his death in 1976 he had become the very image of the eccentric billionaire recluse, his fortune and his strange final years the stuff of endless fascination.