Maus

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and acclaimed as "the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust "(The Wall Street Journal). The first volume introduces readers to Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and history itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive. Tragic and comic by turns, it attains a new complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. The two volumes tie together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing tale of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of daily life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father.

 "Art Spiegelman... to the comics world is a Michelangelo and a Medici both, an influential artist who is also an impresario and an enabler of others." (//The New York Times Magazine//). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus, which was followed by Maus II, he is one of the world's best-known graphic artists. "It would be almost impossible to overstate the influence of Maus among other artists" (//The New York Times Magazine//). Born in Stockholm in 1948, Spiegelman rejected his parents' aspirations for him to become a dentist, and began to study cartooning in high school and drawing professionally at age 16. He went on to study art and philosophy at Harpur College before joining the underground comics movement. As creative consultant for Topps Candy from 1965-1987, Spiegelman designed Wacky Packages, Garbage Pail Kids and other novelty items, and taught history and aesthetics of comics at the School for Visual Arts in New York from 1979-1986. In 1980, Spiegelman founded //RAW//, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Francoise Mouly. His work has since been published in many periodicals, including //The New Yorker//, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003. He has since published a children’s book entitled //Open Me... I'm A Dog//, as well as the illustration accompaniment to the 1928 book //The Wild Party//, by Joseph Moncure March. In addition to the Pulitzer, Spiegelman has been honored with a Guggenheim fellowship and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.