Darrell Huff

Who was Darrell Huff?

Darrell Huff was an American writer, and is best known as the author of How to Lie with Statistics, the best-selling statistics book of the second half of the twentieth century.

Huff was born in Gowrie, Iowa, and educated at the University of Iowa,. Before turning to full-time writing in 1946, Huff served as editor of Better Homes and Gardens and Liberty magazine. As a freelancer, Huff produced hundreds of "How to" feature articles and wrote at least sixteen books, most of which concerned household projects. One of his biggest projects was a prize-winning home in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where he lived until his death.

Anti-tobacco historian Robert N. Proctor wrote that Huff "was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent Surgeon General's report of myriad failures and 'fallacies'."