Catch Me If You Can, the autobiography Frank William Abagnale Jr. co-wrote with Stan Redding and published in 1980, recounts his claimed career as a con man, covering impersonations that he said ranged from a Pan American World Airways pilot to a Georgia hospital physician to a Louisiana assistant attorney general.

Abagnale was born on April 27, 1948, in Bronxville, New York, a citizen of both the United States and France. He was educated at Iona Grammar School and later at Iona Preparatory School. His documented crimes consist primarily of check fraud, along with petty theft, and he is a convicted felon. The claims in the autobiography — that he successfully passed himself off as an airline pilot, a physician, and a lawyer — made his story one of the more colorful accounts of long-running deception to reach a popular readership.

After his criminal history became public, Abagnale built a second career working as a security consultant, and he also pursued work as an author and entrepreneur. He received FBI Honorary Medals, a recognition that reflected his later consultancy role rather than his earlier record. The 1980 book itself was the product of collaboration with journalist Stan Redding, and the two shaped the material into a first-person narrative that moved between Abagnale's various claimed identities.

The autobiography reached a much wider audience when Steven Spielberg adapted it as a film in 2002, with Leonardo DiCaprio portraying Abagnale. The film brought renewed attention to the book and to Abagnale himself, who by that point had spent years working as a security consultant. That 2002 release, with DiCaprio in the lead role and Spielberg directing, remains the most concrete marker of how far the story traveled from its origins as a paperback autobiography co-authored more than two decades earlier.