The Counterfeiters is a novel by André Gide and one of the notable works associated with his career in French fiction, a self-reflexive narrative in which questions of authenticity and artifice are embedded in the structure of the story itself.

Gide was born in Paris on 22 November 1869 and remained a French citizen who worked throughout his life in the French language. He produced work across an unusually wide range of forms, serving at various points as a novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, diarist, autobiographer, literary critic, travel writer, journalist, screenwriter, translator, and film producer. This breadth of output meant that no single genre defined the whole of his career. Among his other notable works are The Fruits of the Earth, a prose work in French, The Immoralist, a novel, and Les Caves du Vatican, a further work of fiction that extended his engagement with narrative and character.

The range of Gide's output drew sustained international attention across the first half of the twentieth century. He continued producing work in French prose and drama over a long career, and the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, a recognition that encompassed his body of work rather than any single title.

Gide died in Paris on 19 February 1951, in the same city where he had been born more than eighty years earlier. The Counterfeiters, the novel that stands among his most discussed works, represents his sustained engagement with the possibilities of fictional form. His death closed a career that had moved through nearly every prose and dramatic form available to a writer working in the French language, and the Nobel Prize in Literature remains the most formally documented recognition of that body of work.