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Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman which recounts his father's struggle to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew, while also following the author's troubled relationship with his father, and the way the effects of war reverberate through generations of a family. In 1992 it won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award, as the Pulitzer committee could not decide whether to categorize it as fiction or biography.
The author/artist portrays different groups of people anthropomorphically as different species of animals: Jews are portrayed as mice (German: Maus), Germans as cats, French as frogs, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, Swedes as reindeer, Gypsies as moths, and so on. This was both a familiar device from children's cartoons and an ironic nod to Nazi propaganda images that depicted Jews as rats and Poles as pigs, etc. Publication in Poland was delayed [1] because of this anthropomorphic device.
Most of the book was serialized in the Spiegelman-edited RAW magazine. It was then published in two parts (volume one, "My Father Bleeds History" and volume two, "And Here My Troubles Began") before eventually being integrated into a single volume. A CD-ROM edition also exists, although it is no longer in print.
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Last updated: 05-10-2005 13:23:03
