The Recognitions (1955) is a masterpiece by William Gaddis that is part of the modern canon of 20th-century American literature and has been rethought for over half a century as a work between modernism and postmodernism. A novel that has absorbed the best artistic techniques of both eras. This duality is the key to the masquerade novel, and at the same time its curse. The three parts of the novel (the number of panels in a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch) tell the story of Wyatt Gwine, the son of a Calvinist minister from New England, a talented artist who made a Faustian deal to forge old masters for the New York art fraudster Rectal Brown. Around this plot core, a complex narrative system unfolds, spanning three decades on three continents and addressing religion, alchemy, witchcraft, art history, medicine, hagiography, mythology, anthropology, astronomy, metaphysics, and other fields of knowledge. But Gaddis’s extraordinary erudition, paradoxically, repelled the first readers of The Recognitions, and only later did this novel receive the recognition it deserved. In 2022, on the 100th anniversary of William Gaddis’s birth, the New York Book Review series reissued key works, and a major conference dedicated to the author’s work was held at Washington University in St. Louis. Gaddis’s influence on world literature has yet to be fully understood, but, as Cole Fishman aptly noted, “William Gaddis may not be your favorite author, but he is probably your favorite author’s favorite author.”