Recognizing The Recognitions

[Mark Kohut]

Gaddis spent seven years writing The Recognitions. The novel began as a much 
shorter work and as an explicit parody of Goethe’s Faust. During the period in 
which Gaddis was writing the novel, he travelled to Mexico, Central America and 
Europe. 
Gaddis also found the title for the novel in The Golden Bough as Frazer noted 
how Goethe’s Faust originally came from the Clementine Recognitions, a 
third-century theological tract (See Clementine literature). It was from this 
point on that Gaddis began to expand the novel. The novel was completed in 
1949.[3]
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