The history of world literature during the first half of the twentieth century is now being written. Among the novels of that era a small handful seem assured of permanence. There are Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, James Joyce's Ulysses, Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and—without question—Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters.

Dorothy Bussy's excellent translation of Les Faux Monnayeurs was first published in 1927. To this edition of The Counterfeiters has been added the first English translation (by Justin O'Brien, well-known authority on Gide and translator of the Journals of Andre Gide) of the daybook kept by Gide while writing the novel. This Journal of "The Counterfeiters" (Journal des Faux Monnayeurs) supplies a unique view into the mind of a great novelist at work.

ANDRE GIDE was born in Paris in 1869. His first literary works (he began publishing in 1891) established him as a promising addition to the symbolist group; but in 1895, after a voyage of self-discovery in North Africa, he turned to the glorification of life and liberty in works close to the spirit of Nietzsche and Whitman. With Paris and his Norman estate as headquarters, Gide spent much of his long life traveling through-out Europe and Africa while devoting himself to literary creation.

By the time The Counterfeiters appeared (1926), Gide's reputation was solidly established on such brief fictions as Strait Is the Gate and The Immoralist, several highly original plays, and some of the most penetrating literary and philosophic criticism of the epoch.

After World War II, new works by Gide, including his celebrated Journals, continued to appear, and he remained an incredibly young spirit, a leader among those dominating twentieth-century European literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. In 1950 he was made an Honorary Corresponding Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in Paris in 1951.